A moment to be petty

I saw the news today that Rick Santelli is retiring from CNBC.

I was raised not to speak ill of the departed. But he's only departing the airwaves, so I figure the rule hasn't kicked in yet.

For over twenty years the man stood on a trading floor and shouted at individual investors about whatever was going to ruin them by lunch. Every morning brought a fresh emergency, every emergency was urgent, and almost none of them mattered to anybody holding a good business for ten years.

Some of his crowning stupid calls:

• In December 2010, he wrote that the Fed's real goal was to monetize the debt and generate inflation, and predicted time would prove the Fed "highly successful" at it. Time took its sweet time. Four years later, inflation was still limping along under the Fed's own 2% target.

• For years he warned us, practically weekly, that we were headed for Weimar, or Argentina, or some banana republic. Anyone who listened and ran for cover missed the best bull market in decades.

• In July 2014, his own CNBC colleague Steve Liesman told him on live TV that it was impossible for him to have been more wrong. The higher rates never came and the dollar never crashed. Liesman added that every bit of advice he'd given would have lost people money. Rick insisted he wasn't wrong, the money just wasn't moving fast enough to prove him right. Then he walked off the set.

• In March 2020, as COVID arrived, he suggested on air that maybe we'd be better off giving the virus to everybody and getting it over with in a month. The next day he apologized and called it the dumbest, most ignorant thing anybody could have said. On that one, at least, the man and I agree.

That's how you pollute a mind without anyone noticing: one useless distraction at a time, seasoned with fatalism, served hot with a side of short-termism. If you take your investing advice from a man who is yelling, mostly what you learn is how to yell.

Patience never got anybody booked on cable. That's the best argument for it I know.

I'm sure he's fine company at breakfast. I just never invited him to mine, and he showed up anyway.

So here's to a long, happy, quiet retirement. Emphasis on quiet.

Glad I won't have to hear him anymore lol.