END OF AN ERA: Rick Santelli, the CNBC Reporter Credited With Kicking Off the Tea Party Movement is Retiring – Watch His Famous Rant (VIDEO)

CNBC reporter Rick Santelli is retiring. The end of his career is heavy with meaning.

In 2009, as Obama was taking office, Santelli went off on the air in a rant that is often credited as the kickoff of the Tea Party Movement.

In a world of awful media, Santelli was one of the good ones.

Variety has the details on his retirement:

CNBC Veteran Rick Santelli to Exit in October

Rick Santelli, the longtime CNBC economic-indicators analyst whose plain-spoken but passionate takes on the effects of federal policy on average Americans boosted his profile at the business-news outlet, plans to retire from the Versant Media-backed network on October 2.

Santelli’s decision was revealed to CNBC staffers Thursday, but announced on air Friday during a segment on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”

Santelli has been with CNBC since 1999, primarily holding forth from the Chicago Board of Trade, where he would analyze regular federal economic statistics. On Friday, CNBC anchors Becky Quick and Steve Liesman noted that Santelli’s analysis of monthly jobs reports and other key benchmarks would be missed by the network.

Santelli had hard-won experience with trading. Before joining CNBC, he worked for a handful of financial firms, and understood options and futures — financial disciplines not well understood by average retail investors. He also had an early job as an order-filler at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange in markets that included including gold, lumber, T-bills, foreign currencies and livestock.

Santelli is best known for his rant heard around the world. In 2009, he went off on the Obama administration over plans to bail out homeowners who had bought more home than they could afford.

Here’s part of it from Washington Monthly:

“The government is promoting bad behavior,” he thundered from the humble platform of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange trading floor. He angrily challenged Obama, “Why don’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 them 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?”

Most fatefully, Santelli declared, “We’re thinking of having a Chicago Tea Party in July. All you capitalists that want to show up to Lake Michigan, I’m gonna start organizing.”

Here’s the video of that classic moment. The image is a little grainy, but the audio is fine:

Best of luck to Mr. Santelli in his future endeavors.

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