Prof G Markets
The $1.5B Insider Trade Before Trump’s Iran Post — ft. Anthony Scaramucci
26 Mar 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Welcome to Profiteer Markets. I'm Ed Elson. It is March 26th. Let's check in on yesterday's market vitals. The major indices swung through the day but ended the session in the green. Oil declined, treasury yields fell, and finally, Meta and Google shares were little changed after the companies were found liable of negligence in the social media addiction trial. Okay, what else is happening?
The Iran war is shining a spotlight on insider trading, and Washington may be at the center of it. On Monday morning, roughly $1.5 billion in S&P futures were purchased, and $192 million in oil futures were sold. That was five minutes before President Trump announced that productive conversations with Tehran were underway. The position netted $60 million minutes after the Truth Social post,
Senator Chris Murphy called it, quote, mind-blowing corruption and asked publicly whether Trump, a family member or a White House staffer, was behind the trade. Meanwhile, the FT separately flagged $580 million in crude oil futures that traded 14 minutes before the announcement. Okay.
Here to help us untangle what is going on here, we're speaking with Anthony Scaramucci, the founder and managing partner of SkyBridge Capital. Anthony, thank you for joining us. Please, I know you have thoughts.
Well, first of all, it's great. It's great to be on. So I want to add to that, if you don't mind. So April 2nd, 2025, Liberation Day, they put trades on that got short the market prior to the announcement. You know, when Trump came down from Mount Evil, like Orange Moses with the big tablets, okay, they got short the market prior to that divulgement.
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Chapter 2: What insider trading events are linked to Trump's Iran announcement?
They closed the short position. So I think this stuff is reprehensible, but I don't think it's changing.
I'm so glad you mentioned all of the previous instances that this has happened, because it seems that everyone is focused on, look at the insider trading as it relates to Iran. And then my mind goes back to, yes, exactly, Liberation Day, when we seemed to see the same thing. Then the post-Liberation Day taco. We've seen this constantly over and over again.
As you say, it's happened on both sides, but the level with which it has been I guess, shameless. The fact that they don't seem to care at all. The fact that the kids are investing in these drone companies as well before we go and launch these attacks on Iran. Combined with the fact, as you also mentioned, you made all the points that I hoped you would make, which is...
the SEC director has left because she tried to investigate this stuff, and she got scolded by her bosses, and we saw similar things with the DOJ as well. And so I guess the question becomes... I mean, how bad has this gotten? And do you think that people are properly recognizing this? Because I see what's happening.
This is like the greatest corruption we've ever seen, or at least that I'm aware of. That to me is like, it's a cut above just regular political gripes. This seems to me like this is a serious issue that, I don't know, that people need to at least vote on or at least consider voting on.
So, the woman that you're referring to, her name is Margaret Ryan, because she was just with the SEC for many years, and she basically resigned under protest because she said that she cannot get any enforcement... of any of these actions. And by the way, these are easy to tag, and these are easy to geocenter the tag on the trading.
You can find out immediately who's doing all this stuff, and then you can start bringing cases. And she's been told by her bosses that she cannot do that. So I think that's reprehensible. But I want to take you back, because you said this is the worst corruption ever. We had the Teapot Dome scandal, unbelievable corruption, but those people got prosecuted.
That was at the turn of the century, the 1800s into the 1900s. We had the ab scam case when I was in high school. This is back in the 1980s where two congressmen were caught on a bribe. OK, where the FBI had a wire on them and they got caught saying, oh, yeah, give us that money and we'll change our position on this policy inside the inside the government. And they got caught.
So the point I'm making, we have corruption in the country. We have political corruption, banking corruption, all sorts of corruption. But attached to that corruption was some level of law enforcement. And some level of justice. I'm not saying it's perfect, but at least there was a supposition in the countries, oh, wow, do something wrong like that, that bald face, there will be repercussions.
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Chapter 3: How did Anthony Scaramucci describe the corruption surrounding insider trading?
Yeah. And, you know, look, the flip side is, you know, the congressmen are going to say, you pay me $180,000 a year. I can't afford to live. And so I'm going to enrich myself by doing this. And I want to make this last point because I need your listeners to hear this. Yeah. We have this thing called Citizens United. Which means people can give unlimited donations to the congressman, right?
All political candidates, all policies, unlimited donations. So here's what's going on. The Congress has a 14% approval rating. It's slightly above Kim Il-Jung, the North Korean dictator. However... The individual congressman has a 95% incumbent rate. So their narrative to their people is, who cares, man? I'm going to do whatever the hell I want.
The money's coming in from big food, big pharma, big business, big wealthy. I'm going to get reelected. And so what are we trading today? What information am I going to get? You know how many times a congressman has bought defense stocks the day before, two days before the contract is announced that the appropriations is going to that defense contractor?
I mean, it is staggering and it is sad and it is tragic. And it's very unfair to the American people.
My question to you before we let you go, I mean, you're in the politics game, or at least you're a political commentator. You have been in politics. I mean, this to me seems like it could be the issue going into the midterms and perhaps for the presidential election as well. I mean, there are certain issues that are political issues. There are certain things that are cultural.
There are issues with DEI. Some people believe that tariffs are a good idea. Some people think it's a bad idea. But this issue seems to be so brazen and so criminal that it makes me believe that this is probably going to be the ultimate issue, and that is the issue of corruption and insider trading and profiting off of being elected into a position of power.
As someone who's, you know, in politics, do you think that that will transpire?
So I don't. And it should, but I don't. Let me tell you, let me give you a quick history. Peter Schweitzer wrote about this insider trading stuff in 2012. 60 Minutes did a big story on it. And the Congress said, oh, we're going to pass something called the 2012 Stock Act, which prohibited the use of non-public information for trading.
And so there was an eight-month period of time where the Congress was handcuffed and they couldn't trade. Then by voice vote, Ed, they didn't even want to go onto the floor because they didn't want to be seen on C-SPAN. By voice vote, they called in and said, let's put it back in. Okay, we're going to vote on putting it back in. Yes, we're voting and putting it back in.
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Chapter 4: What political consequences could arise from insider trading allegations?
Should private credit have been sold to retail? Right. And I think the answer to that question is mostly no. And we're suffering the ramifications of that right now. And the second issue, which is related, is are we starting a credit cycle in private credit? And how bad is it going to be?
So let me address the first question first, and then we'll get to the second question, because every piece of news that you hear is related to that. Private credit funds were originally created for institutional money, and that makes a lot of sense because you're talking about long-term illiquid loans, and institutions know what they're getting.
They're getting a higher yield in exchange for less liquidity, and that's fine. After Private Credit basically sold their funds to every single institution on planet Earth, they looked around and they say, okay, now who do we sell it to? And they said, let's sell it to retail. The problem is that with retail, you have to create liquidity.
So what they did was they created mostly what I like to call the illusion of liquidity or semi-liquidity. Now, all this was disclosed. None of this is illegal. So no one's going to jail for this. This was all disclosed in the prospectuses. Whether the retail investors actually understood what they were getting into, who knows? But no question it was adequately disclosed.
All these funds have quarterly caps in their documents. Most of the funds have a 5%. quarterly redemption cap. Some have seven, but most have five. And so what's been happening is as for the last year, the news on private credit has gotten steadily worse. And we could talk about, you know, where that's happened. And so the redemption notices are universally coming in now above the 5% cap.
And with the exception of Blackstone in the most recent quarter, which did honor a 7.9% redemption notice, even though the cap is 5%, everybody else has just honored the cap. That's part one. Part two is that we have not had a credit cycle in the United States since the great financial crisis. And that has bred a tremendous amount of complacency amongst lenders.
And we are overdue for a credit cycle. And traditionally, if you know anything about lending history, whenever there is a credit cycle, the place that it takes place almost 100% of the time is the asset class that grew the most. So in the great financial crisis, the asset class that grew the most was subprime mortgages, and that blew up the most.
Um, since the great financial crisis, the banks have not had much loan growth at all. Um, all the loan growth has really been in private credit. Private credit 10 years ago was a 300 billion per year market. And now it's close to a 2 trillion per year market. Wow. So you're starting to see cracks in credit. Um, You mentioned that this KKR fund got downgraded by Moody's.
By the way, the rating agencies are always very slow. If the rating agencies are downgrading it, you know it's bad. That's a real problem. Now it's a problem. Because if even the rating agencies admit there's a problem, problem. Yes. So you have one downgrade of a fund because its non-accruals were too high. I think they were 5.5%, which is probably the highest in the industry.
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