Meltdown: Rick Santelli Loses It On Steve Liesman and a panel of his colleagues backs Liesman!
Outspoken (and many would say empty headed polemicist and attention hound) CNBC reporter Rick Santelli gets into one of his most-heated arguments ever with economics reporter Steve Liesman and a panel of four other financial reporters over Fed policy, inflation and interest rates.
Santelli's CNBC colleagues do not seem even remotely amused. Watch it here. It gets heated about 2:30 in, really boils over at around 6 minutes,.
Whoa.
We’re used to seeing CNBC reporter Rick Santelli rant, and rave. He established it as part his brand at the start of the financial crisis, in a tirade against the bailout that called for a new “tea party” protest. But he has been given a lot of wiggle room by his fellow reporters, and at times, open admiration for "telling it like it is." Not this time.
Steve Liesman seems to have lost all patience with him and summed up the opinion of the panel and Paul Richards at UBS:
“Rick, there is no single piece of advice you’ve given that’s worked, Rick. Not a single one. It is impossible for you to be more wrong. Your call for inflation, the destruction of the dollar, the failure of the U.S. economy to rebound. Every single bit of advice you have given would have lost people money.
Santelli walks off camera at about 11 minutes. Why?
He is one of the co-creators of the Tea Party Movement - his rant is often referenced as the call to arms for those who were angry with government for its bailing out of Wall Street. But it went further than that. Paul Krugman summed up the impact of his live call to arms in this way...Somehow, [the Republican Party] has become infected by an almost pathological meanspiritedness, a contempt for what CNBC's Rick Santelli, in the famous rant that launched the Tea Party, called "losers." If you're an American, and you're down on your luck, these people don't want to help; they want to give you an extra kick...." http://www.nytimes.com/...
Want to see that rant? Here it is.
His career is heavily invested in conditions like those he describes, many at the core of the Tea Party Movement. This time the rest of the panel eventually dismisses and, in some cases, mocks him outright. He had to walk...keep on walking, Rick.
Time for someone to look for another occupation.