JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon said he is concerned over current fiscal policies and skeptical about the market’s optimism for a “soft landing.” And while he never mentioned Bitcoin—he promised he wouldn’t—American financier Anthony Scaramucci said Dimon’s risk-averse comments suggest that he needs to ”do more homework” on the digital asset.
It started with an inflation-focused interview with CNBC at the annual Global High Yield & Leveraged Finance Conference in Miami, where Dimon said he was “kind of cautious about everything.”
“All these factors we talked about—QT, fiscal spending deficits, the geopolitics, those things may play out over multiple years,” Dimon said. “But they will play out and have an effect, and we just don’t know what they are.”
Dimon noted the financial market’s ability to change quickly and said that confidence in the market is currently high, but cautioned against overly focusing on short-term economic indicators at the expense of understanding long-term trends.
“There’s more [mergers and acquisitions] chatter, equity markets are up, and spreads are getting close to historical lows,” Dimon said. “There’s a lot of money chasing high-yield deals, so things are open. Markets are high, people feel it. So, so far, so good.”
During a separate interview with CNBC on Tuesday, SkyBridge Capital founder and managing partner Anthony Scaramucci was asked about Dimon’s remarks. Scaramucchi said the JP Morgan CEO was one of, if not the, smartest person in financial services. He then went after Dimon’s infamous criticisms of Bitcoin.
“Jamie’s a very smart guy. He’s smarter than me, so I always listen to him,” Scaramucci said. “Of course, I’m that intellectual odds with him related to Bitcoin.”
Scaramucci said Dimon is one of the few people he sets Google Alerts for, but chastised the banking billionaire for his limited understanding of the top cryptocurrency.
“I would just ask him to please do more homework because people like Paul Tudor Jones or Stan Druckenmiller, or somebody like Larry Fink, who’s actually done the homework, were perhaps negative on Bitcoin prior to doing the homework,” he said. “It’s a one-way ticket towards Bitcoin if you actually do the homework to fully understand the asset.”
One reason to pay attention to read up on Bitcoin, Scaramucci said, was the upcoming halving on or around April 20.
“If you look at the last 14 years, you usually get a quadruple after the halving,” he said.
The Bitcoin halving refers to an event every four years when the amount of Bitcoin given as a reward to cryptocurrency miners is cut in half. The 64th and final halving will occur sometime in 2140, after which no more Bitcoin will be created.
“Bitcoin right now is trading at $57,000; I’m not sure where it’ll be on or about April 20, when the halving takes place, but let’s say it’s at $50,000,” Scaramucci said. “ That would imply over 18 months from the halving a $200,000 Bitcoin price.
“The price is going up, primarily because there’s not a lot of supply out there,” he said.
Scaramucci pointed to the recently approved spot Bitcoin ETFs driving up demand and outpacing the available supply of Bitcoin with demand 12 to 14 times higher than the daily output of Bitcoin, causing its price to surge.
“And, of course, you do have people that don’t believe in Bitcoin that are short Bitcoin, and so they’re getting wrecked right now,” he said. “I think that’s the combination of why you’re seeing such great price appreciation.”
Acknowledging that he has been humbled by the markets and politics, the former Trump administration spokesman reiterated his confidence in Bitcoin and its potential to surpass gold.
“Gold [is] a $16 trillion asset, and Bitcoin has a lot of the same properties as gold,” Scaramucci said. “I would make a case that it’s better than gold because it’s easier to move around. It should trade to at least half of that. It’s at a trillion dollars right now.”
Dimon has made no secret of his disdain for BTC, once telling U.S. lawmakers that Bitcoin should be shut down during testimony on Capitol Hill.
“The true use case for it [crypto] is criminals, drug traffickers, money laundering, tax avoidance,” Dimon told lawmakers during a Senate Banking Committee hearing in December. “If I was the government, I’d close it down.”
In January, as the financial world waited to see if the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission would approve a series of spot Bitcoin ETFs, Dimon again railed against Bitcoin, saying the digital asset “has no value.”
Edited by Ryan Ozawa.