Hedge fund manager and former White House communications advisor Anthony Scaramucci predicted last week that Bitcoin would go to $100,000 within two years. The bullish forecast came as the founder of hedge fund Skybridge Capital outlined some of his other predictions for financial markets in 2022-23.
“I think Bitcoin will have 100 million plus wallets and it could be an inflation hedge but that’s a good five to eight years away,” Scaramucci said. “For an average investor I would buy some and average in. The only way you can handle a technology like this is to dollar cost averaging and buy a little every month.”
Bitcoin to go to $500,000 eventually
Scaramucci said he though Bitcoin would reach $500,000 eventually: “This is early adopting technology. This will be very volatile. There’ll be periods of time where Bitcoin will crash, down 50 plus percent. But if you’re willing to zoom out and look at the long term chart and look at the adoption story, could Bitcoin get to a half a million dollars a coin? I believe it will. Could we have a lot of stops and starts during that period of time? I think the answer is yes.”
He said he was doubtful that Bitcoin can reach $100,000 this year, but was more more confident over the two year time frame. “I’m very confident of that. But we’ve got some work to do here from a regulatory perspective. We got to get the markets to calm down a little bit.”
Scaramucci did not limit himself to cryptocurrency markets however. He said he expected that inflation would not be returning to 2% anytime soon. Rather, he thinks we have another quarter of what he called “nasty inflation numbers.” As supply chains reset themselves, particularly in the US, He anticipates that the global economy will eventually normalise, and those inflation numbers will come down.
Scaramucci on US inflation numbers
The Federal Reserve and Jerome Powell have already indicated that they are going to raise US interest rates by another 25bps this month, and the market is pricing that in. Scaramucci said he felt that was still a scant increase given the current state of inflation.
“The big issue for everybody is the dollar volume that’s in the system right now,” he explained. “Remember, we’ve got a $9 trillion Federal Reserve balance sheet since April 1 of 2020. It’s an astronomical increase in the amount of money that’s in circulation in the economy. And that’s one of the main reasons why we’ve got the inflation coupled with the supply chain disruption so he’s going have to start taking that money out of the market.”
Scaramucci says Powell was doing that successfully in 2017-18 into 2019. The market did correct as a result of that. “So the markets is pricing this stuff in, I think JP Morgan, or one of the big banks, that is going to be seven or eight rate increases,” Scaramucci observed. “That’s only [a] 2% increase. Frankly, if you’re going at 25% a piece, my prediction is going to be less than that. I think the overnight rate by the end of the year will be probably be at 1.25% percent. I don’t think it gets to 2%.”
Anthony Scaramucci is a well known figure in the North American hedge fund community. He left Goldman Sachs in 1996 to set up Oscar Capital Management, a firm he later sold to Neuberger Berman. He founded hedge fund SkyBridge Capital in 2005 when I was editing The Hedge Fund Journal and went on to found the successful SALT hedge fund conference which typically was hosted in Las Vegas. He also served briefly as the White House communications director in 2017 before falling out with then president Donald Trump.
