What Are They Teaching Them in the Business School?

CNBC's Rick Santelli gave Left Blogistan a hardy laugh yesterday with this rant on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange trading floor.

Jane Hamsher at FDL picks the story up today and draws attention to this observation from Charles Lemos at MyDD.

I spent a decade on Wall Street working for Alex. Brown & Sons, Deutsche Banc Securities and Goldman Sachs. I found Wall Street a largely liberal environment with one major exception, the trading floor. In my experience I found traders, who are largely white ethnics -Irish, Italian, Greek, Polish or Slovak among others- and graduates of the Seton Halls, the Boston Colleges, the Notre Dames, the Penn States were the most rabid conservative and foul mouthed people on the planet.[Emphasis added.] Nor could any of them ever get my name right. "My name is Charles, not Chuckie" was something I would repeat whenever I had the misfortune to have to interact with them. Some of these folks made William Buckley appear moderate.

Whatever my own views on traders and their culture, it appears that Rick Santelli is their patron saint. In his five minute rant, Mr. Santelli went on to compare Barack Obama's America to Castro's Cuba and to suggest a kind of modern day "Boston Tea Party" - a call for a Chicago Tea Party as an anti-spending revolt. Mr. Santelli's "I'm mad as hell and I am not going to take it" tirade on CNBC brought cheers and applause on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade not to mention accolades from across the conservative blogs.

It must make the people in Smeal proud that their high tech showpiece Trading Room has produced such outstanding graduates.

Of course, I've always thought that most of Penn State was a glorified trade school.

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