Rick Santelli (12 January 1953-) was an editor for the CNBC Business News channel who is most famous for his formation of the Tea Party movement in a 19 February 2009 speech calling for a "tea party" by Chicago bond-dealers against the United States government (in reference to the Boston Tea Party of 1774).
Biography[]
Rick Santelli was born on 12 January 1953 in Chicago, Illinois to a family of immigrants from Italy. He graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1979 and joined the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the Chicago Board of Trade. Santelli became Vice-President of Interest Rate Futures and Options, but he found that the financial industry was changing in a way detrimental to his family, so in 1999 he took a full-time job wth CNBC. On 19 February 2009, he made a famous statement saying that the United States government encouraged bad behavior and that a "Chicago Tea Party" was possible, and the Tea Party movement took its name from his statement. Supporters of Libertarianism praised him, but supporters of liberalism criticized his mean personality.