Why Americans are losing hope in the economy: Anthony Scaramucci

Anthony Scaramucci (0:00)

I mean, I've got my ass fired from the White House. I'm getting lit up by the late night comedians, excoriated in the press.

I was like, hey, dad, are you gonna be okay? Well, it was the first time in my life where my kid was trying to parent me.

Brian Sozzi (0:14)

Welcome to a new edition of Power Players. I'm so excited to welcome in my next guest. I talk to him all the time, but he's the author of the new book, All the Wrong Moves, How Three Catastrophic Decisions Led to the Rise of Trump. That's Anthony Scaramucci. Good to see you.

Anthony Scaramucci (0:29)

Good to see you, too. I was just saying, if that book was about all my wrong moves, it would have been the size of a phone book by then. So it was just about a historical analysis of how we got to where we are.

Brian Sozzi (0:39)

When did you find time to write this? You're still out. You got a day job.

Anthony Scaramucci (0:41)

I'm on the planes a lot, and I had two good research assistants that helped me with it.

I'm always asked the question when I'm traveling or speaking, what happened? How did we get so tribal, so partisan? How did such a large group of people in the United States feel left out? A group of people I grew up with, you grew up with that were economically aspirational as working class people, how did they become desperation from an economic point of view? And so I did about a year's worth of research, formulated a few ideas and put it down and then obviously backed it up.

Brian Sozzi (1:16)

You're famously an 11 days communications director.

Anthony Scaramucci (1:19)

You and I have talked about this in the past. I would say it's more infamously. I don't know if you know who was famously.

Brian Sozzi (1:23)

But you've been steadily pushing back. You've sounded the alarm on what's going on in this country very early on.

Anthony Scaramucci (1:31)

Well, listen, I love the country. I say in the book, I made a mistake working for Donald Trump.

I also objectively explained in the book what Donald Trump has done well. I try to tell people it's really not about left or right, what's right or wrong for the country. And in this book, it is not a partisan book. It's not a witch hunt. It's just an observation, economic observation, political observation, but also a historical observation of what happened in the country to create the moment that we're in right now. And by the way, if you don't like this moment, the last two chapters about how we can repair and how we can rebuild. But I sounded the alarm on President Trump in 2019 because I didn't like, I don't like the politics of hate, don't like the politics of anger. People can criticize me for working for the president when he was ridiculing Mexicans before he got into the presidency. I have to own that. We have some cognitive dissonance in our personalities and we project on to other people what we want them to be as opposed to what they are.

But at least I was man enough to admit my mistakes. And I admit a lot of my mistakes here. I thought some of the things that we did in those three catastrophic decisions, I probably would have supported all three of those at the time. So this is a hindsight test. This is like, okay, hey, we thought this was going to happen. These are well-intended good people trying to make a great decision on behalf of the American people. And the consequences being what they are, they went in a different direction than they originally anticipated.

Brian Sozzi (3:07)

What would you say to someone that would counter that with, Anthony, the stock market set a record high.

Anthony Scaramucci (3:14)

I would say that the country is top heavy. I would say that the dynamics in the country, and I know you talked to a lot of economists, the upper third of the country, certainly the upper 1% of the country is doing incredibly well. Those are the owners of the stocks. The profitability for those large companies are quite good. And that is all well and good, and I'm all about that. But if you look at disposable income, and you look at the median income in the country, you know, we're not catching up. And there's a lot of financial anxiety.

It's a very large group of people that feel left out of the system. That's what I would say.

Brian Sozzi (3:51)

It is top heavy. You know, the other side of it is, you know, I track a lot of companies. I read a lot of earnings called transcripts. And companies that are exposed to Dollar Tree, Dollar General, and these people can't even afford to make it week to week. I mean, they're cutting back on what they can eat week to week. Suddenly, a trip to McDonald's is too damn expensive.