Rick Santelli
12-Jan-1953
United States
Journalist
Rick Santelli was born on January 12, 1953 in Chicago, Illinois to a family of Italian immigrants. 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 Rates Futures and Options, but found that the financial industry was changing in a dangerous way for his family, so in 1999 he took a full-time job at CNBC. On February 19, 2009, he made the famous statement that the United States government was promoting immorality and that there might be a "Chicago Tea Party", and the Tea Party took its name from its statement. Supporters of Libertarianism praised him, but supporters of liberation criticized his bad character.