CNBC Blows a Gasket
We sent this message to CNBC (Squawk@CNBC.com) yesterday, where it disappeared down the rat-hole, never to be seen again.
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To: CNBC
Have we missed something? Has Fox News taken over CNBC?
It’s not just Rick Santelli and Larry Kudlow — now everybody is an ideological moralizer, vehemently blaming the victims, not the perpetrators, in the mortgage meltdown. Even Melissa Francis, Michele Caruso-Cabrera, Mark Haines, and Joe Kernan are loudly lamenting public policy, about which they know very little, and neglecting investment insight, which is what they’re paid to deliver.
Please give them two reality checks:
a) As the Wall Street Journal figured out, 60% of subprime mortgages in 2005 and 2006 were issued to people who could have qualified for prime mortgages – at lower rates, with lower fees and more options – and few of them would be in trouble now. They were steered into subprimes because those were much more lucrative to banks and mortgage brokers.
b) Where were all the CNBC moralizers when there was still time to warn the innocent victims to avoid those traps?
Why are the same financial journalists who had nary a negative word for the predatory bankers (when it mattered) now suddenly enraged at the homeowners whom the bankers were fleecing?
Finally, tell Rick Santelli, who is outraged at having to help pay for his neighbor’s rescue, that low and middle income renters — who do not enjoy the mortgage interest and property tax deductions he gets — have been subsidizing him all along.
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You e-mail may have gone down the “CNBC rathole”, but I’ve sent it along to about 40 friends.
Keep up the great work!
Comment by Mrs D. — February 27, 2009 @ 12:25 pm
Hey, thanks! That’s the kind of pyramid scheme we need more of
– or is it a communications tree? Three generations of that pass-along, and our audience would be twice the size of CNBC’s.
Comment by Al — February 27, 2009 @ 3:11 pm