Remember back in the fall when John McCain lied to David Letterman about why he was bailing on his show at the last minute and Dave proceeded to rip him a new one for most of an hour?

Well, Rick Santelli, that CNBC analyst who went on a rant about those irresponsible homeowners getting bailed out, while standing on teh floor of the Merc, was supposed to be Jon Stewart's guest last night. He also canceled. Jon also spent the entire show ripping into CNBC and TV financial analysts in general in a truly beautiful take-down of these "financial experts". If you missed it, watch below.

If you want to know why I am not afraid of the impending destruction of capitalism at the hands of the Obama administration, it's because the people predicting such things have not shown me any reason to believe they know what they're talking about, except that what they say may make THEM richer. MAY.

http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index ... ra-is-here

(the website is running REALLY slow right now, pretty popular vids I guess)


The links embedded in this kos diary seem to work, so I'd just go watch them there.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/3/5/ ... 936/704872

although they informed me that Canada has a different interwebs and i had to visit another website to see it...that clip was great

I love how Stewart has the power to take just about anyone down, kinda like he did Crossfire on CNN. He's quite unassuming most of the time but you know that politicians and financiers are afraid of him.

Great line in there too:
-CNBC: Before we let you go, is it fun being a Billionaire?

-Allan Stanford, CEO Stanford Financial: Yes, it's, it's fun being a billionaire, hehe.

-Jon Stewart: FUCK YOU!

just watched the whole episode last night(except the interview, didn't have time)
great, great episode

I thought this was the money quote of teh night:

Isn't the Dow Jones Industrial Average just a short-twitch numerical representation of a bunch of guesses about other people's assumptions about the financial well-being of an arbitrarily chosen group of 30 out of tens of thousands of possible companies? No! You're wrong! It is a real-time, cause-and-effect precision barometer of how the President is doing. It's been that way for years.

Yes, that was fantastic. The entire episode was one of the best, ever. However, some of his CNBC clips were a little stupid. On one of them, David Faber was just reporting what John Thain/Merrill Lynch had said to reporters. He wasn't commenting on it.

Stewart had no counterarguement against Santelli's homeowner rant. He was basically using lots of sarcasm, but didn't prove Santelli's point wrong. Funny stuff, but how about putting him in his place? Ripping on CNBC was pretty good though.

Wasn't Santelli's rant about how homeowners should have known better, despite the fact that teh "experts" didn't know what they were talking about either, and if the homeowners had done research they would have found hacks like Santelli and crooks like Jim Cramer telling them that it was a great time to buy a house? Doesn't that dispute his point pretty well?

There's a big difference between advice on investing and buying a mortgage. Unless you know exactly what you're doing, stocks are basically a gamble. Buying a mortgage, however, everything's on paper: rate, fixed/adjustable, etc. I agree that the CNBC "experts" don't know any better, but they're not the ones telling you to sign here and here. Technically, nothing is forced. Personal responsibility has to play a part here somewhere. Also, I've never heard anyone advising to buy property in this market. If Santelli said that, screw him, but I didn't get that feeling from him during his rant.

(Btw, I typed a whole paragraph saying that the only way Cramer could be a crook is if he shorted stocks that he advised others to buy, which the article stated he did )

I wasn't talking about in this market. I was talking about 3-5 years ago, when all the people who are in trouble today bought into the housing market.

Point is, even with the housing market, it wasn't until years after the fact that the "experts" seemed to understand what had happened, what with the mortgage-backed securities and such, and I think it's really hypocritical to blame homeowners for their current pickles. For every person who overextended themselves irresponsibly, there are 10 who just had the rug ripped out from under them by having their property lose 30% of its value (and often their jobs and life savings because of the interconnectedness of everything else in the economy). Practically every family I know in Phoenix is either under water on their mortgage or close to it, and most of them only because they were unfortunate enough to have bought their homes in 2005 or 2006. These are not people living extravagant lifestyles in homes that are far beyond their needs.

Santelli seems to just be another asshole who doesn't understand that he can't get rich if the fabric of society around him (you know, the other PEOPLE) is shredded. Even thieves feel recessions when their victims have nothing left to steal.

can i ask, just as an aside, why exactly does it hurt your ability to survive today if your home loses value? ok, with an ARM, if the rate goes up, then yes, that does make sense that it would hurt because that's a real cost you see when you pay your bills, but if you have a fixed rate mortgage(which is/was the safe thing to do), why is it going to hurt someone to owe more on their house than it's worth? They would still be paying the same amount of money, so in what way would it hurt them?

I've wondered this myself. I think it is more that people just feel cheated, especially if they recently bought their home, and they want to rework their mortgage so they have to pay less. If other people are getting reworked mortgages, why can't they?

Does it hurt my ability to "survive?" No. I can afford my current mortgage. However, when one purchases a home, historically it as a sound investment that appreciates yearly. With the equity you build, you can borrow against it for home improvements, or eventually refinance to a lower rate when one becomes available. Besides all that, who wants to own something that's worth less than what you owe on it? Who wants to see their investment cost them money in the long term?

ok, i do get that. that's what i thought it was, i assumed there was nothing more going on than what you laid out.

The main problem is the resetting mortgages, more than the home being worth less than someone paid. Most people are having trouble paying their monthly bills.

is that due to people opting for ARMs, as opposed to Fixed Rate Mortgages?

Well, any fixed rate wouldn't cause this problem unless someone lost a job.

Most of the people who couldn't afford homes got ARMs for that exact reason. They were "fooling" themselves into thinking they could afford it.

The irony (that's the wrong word) is, even with prices down 30-40%, many STILL couldn't afford the same home if it was purchases using a traditional 20% down 30 year fix.

that's what i thought... just clarifying

yeah, there were definitely bad decisions all around, and now it's fuckin everyone over. good stuff.