How Bill Clinton 'made' Anthony Scaramucci's hedge fund conference business

Donald Trump's director of communications credited one of the US President's political arch-rivals for the success of his hedge fund conference business in 2015.

Anthony Scaramucci, otherwise known as "The Mooch" (a nickname he picked up playing American football at school) told Bloomberg's Barry Ritholtz that Bill Clinton "credentialised" the annual SkyBridge Alternatives Conference (SALT) when he gave a noteless speech at the Las Vegas-based Bellagio casino in 2010.

"[He's a] super popular guy, not only here in the United States, but globally," Scaramucci said two years ago. "I will tell you this – President Clinton made our conference because in 2009 we had a smaller conference, four to five hundred people, we then said 'let's go big'. I told the guys we are going to go after President Clinton.

"We signed him up. I will tell you upfront that he made our conference because he credentialised the type of speakers that we wanted to get in. It was easier to get President [George W.] Bush, it was easier to get [Republican] Governor [Mitt] Romney..."

Former British Prime Ministers Tony Blair and David Cameron have also spoken at SALT, as well as House of Cards actor Kevin Spacey and basketball star Kobe Bryant. Scaramucci, who launched Skybridge in 2005, sold the investment firm in 2017 to join Trump's administration.

A graduate of Tufts University and Harvard Law School, Scaramucci emerged on Wall Street in the early 1990s as a real estate analyst for Goldman Sachs.

After being fired from the job after just 18 months, he would later rejoin Goldman in the company's sales division. "The Mooch" would leave Goldman again in 1996 to co-found Oscar Capital Management with Andy Boszhardt before selling the firm in 2001 and going on to set up his hedge fund seeder, Skybridge Capital.

Scaramucci, 53, has hit the headlines for all the wrong reasons over the past week. He reportedly described Reince Priebus, the White House chief-of-staff, as a "f***ing paranoid schizophrenic" and said "I'm not Steve Bannon [one of Trump's top aides], I'm not trying to suck my own c**k".

The Long Island-born businessman has also urged the media to stay out of his private life amid reports that his wife of three years has filed for divorce.

"Leave civilians out of this. I can take the hits, but I would ask that you would put my family in your thoughts and prayers [and] nothing more," he told his 160,000 Twitter followers.