The Fuck You at the end summed it up best for me.

Jon Stewart is funny as hell, but the slam on all the CNBC people was a bit one-sided. They have had quite a bit of good advice on how to weather the bear market as well. Nail the bullshitting CEOs and scheming investment managers to the wall, but the reporters are not criminals. In fact, I personally think that the financial talking heads are being too negative and possibly adding to all the problems we face on Wall Street.

... and if you listened to the whole Santelli rant live and in context, you might be more likely to see what he was talking about. Personally, I think he is right on the money. Let's help the people that got scammed, but if you took out a bigger mortgage than you can afford, you have a problem.

Still, that was classic Stewart.

I read somewhere that Santelli actually has ranted against the whole bailout. Like he wanted the markets/banks/AIG/etc to fail on their own and let the free market fix itself, eventually.
That true Tim?
(You're our resident economics expert.)

I don't know that I'm an economics expert; just a guy closely tied to the economy and markets with a big mouth. Like everyone else, I am stunned at what has been happening in the marketplace. It defies all logic, so I have been wrong about what SHOULD happen as much as anyone else.

As far as Santelli is concerned, he lives and breathes the free market system. Being right there at the CME, he is one of the few people on television that can tell everyone what is really happening in the commodity/bond markets. (That is really a better gauge for the economy than the stock market, so when the traders there lose faith in what is happening in Washington, the government needs to pay attention.) Being that one of the biggest problems we have right now is our frozen (seized up) banking system, nobody knows how to assess risk and, therefore, place bids on bonds. It appears that the traders in Chicago believe that too many rules are unknown or, worse, keep changing. Nobody knows what to do. The belief is that the government should stay out of things and let the traders figure out what risk they are willing to accept and price things accordingly.

I am generally of the same belief except for one thing: the banking system has to be stablized. If the government would have set up an RTC-type agency (like they did in the late 80's) to take the bad assets off the banks books, thus freeing the bank to lend again instead of hoarding cash to cover potential losses, we would have averted a lot of this mess. The government could have sold those bad assets on the open market as prices rebounded. They (er, us taxpayers) may have had to eat some losses, but it likely would not have been as bad as what is happening now.

ANother cracker jack response Tim.

Pity they don't let monkeys anchor TV news show. You'd make a lot of sense on TV.

Meh. I just glad my ramblings are able to be understood. If I make any sense at all, at least I'm contributing something.

Sometimes I think that most of the personalities on the financial news shows forget that there is a TV camera and go off on their own tangents ... leaving the TV audience behind. They regularly have 6 or 8 people on at the same time debating the current economic problems and proposed resolutions, but end up talking over one another so much that you can't garner any information at all. Nothing but a circus. It's almost like they expect all of the viewers to watch 24/7 and be degreed in Economics in order to keep up with the wicked-fast banter, and be worthy of the opinions they choose (yes, choose) to share. That is a big reason why I look forward to the interviews they do with the people on the floor at the NYSE and CME. That's about as close to the fire as you can get without going there and jumping into it.

The little bit of economic understanding and market knowledge I've been able to assemble has been through managing my own stock portfolio for the past 10 years or so, while working from home and having CNBC on in the background all day. If I have been able to share anything that helps break through the clouds at all, it's probably because I taught myself all this stuff and didn't muck it all up with some arbitrary college economic department's biased curriculum.

Or something like that ...