During an appearance on Fast Money Halftime Report on Monday, CNBC reporter Rick Santelli got into a heated exchange with his fellow panelists that can only be described as epic. Santelli is known for his spirited commentary – you may recall is infamous 2009 monologue about the Tea Party – but this may take the cake for his most passionate broadcasting moment yet.
Santelli sparred with economic experts and the head of a major bank’s foreign exchange division over the Federal Reserve’s “easy money” policies that have kept interest rates artificially low. In turn, this has caused an artificial stock market bubble that Santelli believes is benefitting the wealthy while ruining the economy.
Watch the exchange, which concludes with Santelli declaring the “end of conversation” and storming off camera, below:
While the majority of commentary has focused on Sanetlli’s animated response, on radio this morning, Glenn took a deeper look at the substance of his comments in relation to the current state of the global economy and politics.
After weeks of debating the use of the term “humanitarian crisis,” the media and the left are beginning to float around the idea of granting refugee status to those who have entered the country illegally over the last several months. More than anything else that has been discussed in relation to the immigration crisis, the word “refugee” frightens Glenn most.
“I'm quite concerned about the whole idea of refugee status,” Glenn said. “I believe this is something I said five years ago: What they are doing to Israel, they are going to do to the United States of America. This is back in the days when I was talking about Mex-Americana… And I was talking about how we would just be one big continent. And there won't be any borders.”
In order to accomplish this single continent scheme, the United States would need to be equalized. While the Mexican peso could never be valuable enough to challenge the U.S. dollar, the U.S. dollar could be devalued enough to rival the Peso.
“You had to equalize America. You had do bring the U.S. dollar down [because] there was no way to bring the peso up,” Glenn explained. “[I said] this was under the Bush Administration, and everybody said I was crazy. Listen to Rick Santelli on the floor of the Chicago Exchange. He basically said all this money printing is going to bring us down.”
Everyone on the CNBC panel seems to agree rising interest rates will undoubtedly harm the U.S. economy. To Santelli’s point, however, this current bubble is unsustainable and there is no easy way out of the problem.
“You'll never be able to raise the interest rates to suck all this money back in. You'll never be able to do it. And that's Rick's point. The market would work itself out, if we didn't have this feel good organization called the Federal Reserve, and he's right on it,” Glenn concluded. “So in the end what happens? We equalize the U.S. [dollar] with the peso. The U.S. dollar becomes worthless. And it becomes Mex-Americana.”
Front page image courtesy of the AP