Rick Santelli Slide started on Feb 19, 2009
The Santelli Slide will continue until tax season is over.. reminder !
From the Chicago Tribune
According to CNBC’s Rick Santelli, he didn’t launch into his self-described rant on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade against President Barack Obama’s mortgage bailout plan the other day with any other agenda than to vent his belief “the government is promoting bad behavior” through the program.
Santelli said over the weekend it was only just occurring to him how his newly raised profile from his call for a Chicago Tea Party — which seems to have resonated with many Americans, made him a viral video star and drew a White House rebuke — might be parlayed into other opportunities, as discussed in my Feb. 22 Chicago Tribune column.
“I don’t think in those terms, but maybe I should now,” Santelli, 52, a full-timer on CNBC since 1999 whose current contract is set to run out around the end of this summer, said from his west suburban home. “I have three daughters. I have the whole college thing and what not. You’re absolutely right.”
Santelli, who doesn’t have an agent, said he already has heard from several publishers, a prospect that interests him. (“I’m kind of a closet writer and a closet oil painter,” he said.) And he previously has enjoyed doing talk radio. That said, he noted, “I’m pretty happy with what I do.”
If nothing else, his value to CNBC has increased demonstrably with the exposure it has brought to the cable network owned by General Electric’s NBC Universal. His video has set a record at CNBC.com, scoring many times as many page views as the site’s previous leader, a 2007 rant by Jim Cramer.
“I’ve been associated with them 14 years, 10 years on the payroll, and you never see me much in commercials and what not,” Santelli said. “Boy, has that changed in the last 36 hours.”
A former trader and financial executive, Santelli said he appears on CNBC about 12 to 16 times a day and typically goes off a couple times a week.
“I’m just a fired-up kind of guy and it’s all spontaneous,” he said. “The ranting part, I’m just prone to do that. This one was just different. And no, I certainly didn’t expect it to turn out any different. It’s just that with this one, we really, really tapped into a nerve.
“I think most Americans would rather come up with a way to give a major tax break or subsidy to a first-time buyer that qualifies, help them with their down-payment. … I think the incentive is wrong here. … Really, at the end of the day the bait-and-switch on all these packages is they were originally about jobs, then all of a sudden the stimulus plan turned into a spending package. If you want to help people … make it so it is [about] job creation because that’s what’s going to stop the slide and that’s all that’s going to stop the slide.”
Santelli said the issue, in his view, isn’t political. It’s philosophical.
“I wasn’t for the first stimulus package under the Bush administration,” he said. “I’ve been very consistent on this. I understand what derivatives and toxic assets are. I was in that business. These things are complicated and I don’t know that the taxpayers should own them.”
The point, he said, was to encourage debate.
“I want the new administration to win this one,” Santelli said. “We are all Americans. We want to win this one. It’s a question whether spending our children’s money is going to make us win or not, or is it going to take its own time to heal, like a cold going away. And all this money we’re spending isn’t going to get a very good return and when it’s over, we’re going to be in the hole deep.”
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