What were the loudmouths over at CNBC thinking? Perhaps they've been living in the Wall Street hermetically sealed bubble too long. First, Rick Santelli decided to crap on distressed homeowners facing an epic rate of foreclosures that was fueled by Wall Street's insatiable greed. In light of the trillion dollar bailout of Countrywide, Bears Stern, Merill Lynch, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and other assorted Retail Bankers and Investment Bankers, CNBC's Rick Santelli ranted on the trading floor in front of the cameras about President Obama's proposal to relieve millions of overburdened homeowners. CNBC's Rick Santelli called these homeowners that were duped by predatory lenders and victims of the housing bubble that was engineered by the Bush Administration, Wall Street and the financial sector-- “losers.”
SANTELLI: "The government is promoting bad behavior! How this, president and new administration, why didn't you put up a website to have people vote on the Internet as a referendum to see if we really want to subsidize the losers' mortgages or would we like to at least buy cars and buy houses in foreclosure and give 'em to people that might have a chance to actually prosper down the road and reward people that could carry the water instead of drink the water."
SANTELLI:"This is America! How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor's mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can't pay their bills? Raise their hand. President Obama, are you listening?"
Rick Santelli's Clip from 2/19/2009
Chris Matthews asks the Question: “Who'd ya vote for Rick”
MATTHEWS: OK, let‘s go around it a couple ways. First of all, do you believe the problem here of these over two million people out there facing foreclosure, who are at the bottom of this toxic asset problem, which is at the bottom of our financial crisis, which is the bottom of our economic crisis today and the reason we‘re going into something close to a Depression—so let‘s get at it.
We got a bunch of people out there can‘t afford their houses they‘re living in. Is it their fault because they‘re deadbeats, they shouldn‘t have bought the houses, or is the guy who sold them the house, the woman who sold them the house—was that person a huckster who got them to buy the house with phony-baloney low interest rates, with no down payment, and guess what, allowed them to lie on their application and claim an income they didn‘t have? Who‘s responsible, the huckster or the deadbeat?
SANTELLI: Everybody. You know what?
MATTHEWS: No, no, no. No, no, no. No. You‘re an analyst. Who‘s largely responsible for the problem of these two million cases of toxic assets which are weighing down our financial system and may bring us all to financial hell? Who‘s responsible?
SANTELLI: Well, Chris, think about it. Were these mortgage brokers -
were they licensed? Was there any supervision there? No, OK? Did the people that signed these have their lawyers look at them? If not, shame on them, OK? Chris Matthews, do you sign something without reading the fine print or having a lawyer look over a housing contract? Have you had a lawyer for all your contracts closing on all your properties? Have you?
MATTHEWS: Am I supposed to answer that question? Yes. Occasionally, I find myself not reading the fine print. But let me ask you a question. Did you vote for Obama or McCain?
SANTELLI: I voted for Mr. McCain. It should be between me and my...
MATTHEWS: OK, I‘m just trying to...
SANTELLI: But I did. And you know what? This isn‘t a left or right issue, though.
MATTHEWS: No, I want to know where you‘re coming from politically because you‘re coming down hard on Barack. That‘s all I‘m asking for.
Then, Jim Cramer jumps onto Rick Santelli's bandwagon on MSNBC's Hardball:
BARNICLE: How did it get to this point? How did so many people miss so many signs just over the last year-and-a-half, never mind six or seven years ago, in terms of the housing boom and the mortgages to people who couldn‘t afford them, just the last year-and-a-half? How did so many smart people miss so many stop signs?
CRAMER: There was so much money made, Mike, it wasn‘t worth seeing the stop signs. You could make so much money on one of these trading desks or mortgage desk that, frankly, you stopped caring about your client. Now, I mean, look, I—look, I said that Bank of America (INAUDIBLE) do better than the government, but Bank of America, CitiBank, they all—if you were on the trading desk—I used to be on a trading desk—you could make $5 million, $6 million, $7 million, and it wouldn‘t—you‘d do it in three years. You‘d gaffe (ph) every one of your clients, and then you go home. And we had a level of greed that was only equaled by the amount of money you made. So there was just too much money to be made, Mike. It was just too bountiful.
SANTELLI: “I don‘t think it‘s right in America to reward people that made the wrong decisions. Send them to classes on how to read the small print, but I think that the greater bulk of this country should be getting something and being taken care of and not ignored.”
Okay Messrs. Cramer and Santelli, the losers that couldn't read the “small print” seems to be your Wall Street cronies and their partners in crime the banking sector. Obviously the Wall Street investment houses couldn't read or balance their books, hence trillions of dollars in losses. Clearly the bankers couldn't read the small print as they wrote and approved trillions of dollars in subprime and predatory mortgages. Most certainly, the goof balls on Wall Street couldn't read the small print when the retail bankers and other assorted nefarious lenders dumped DDD-junk and called it AAA-paper. What a bunch of losers on Wall Street. They come to the government with their pants around their ankles begging the government for a handout so the taxpayers of America can subsidize their bogus banking practices.
The one thing that they really, really do teach in business school is how to read a balance sheet. Reading and understanding various spread sheets and ratios is the basis for ALL of the business classes. It's like being a doctor and not knowing how to read a thermometer and blood pressure machine or what those numbers mean. So who is really the “loser” the highly trained professionals in the finance sector or an unsuspecting prospective homebuyer. Either you are a professional or you're not. Can you even read a balance sheet. If so, then why the full scale financial meltdown? Who was really asleep at the switch the passengers or the pilot.
No, Rick Santelli and Jim Cramer, America really doesn't want to bailout “losers.” The problem is that America sees Wall Street, Investment Houses, Bankers and their enablers like CNBC as the perverted losers in this equation.
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