In August 2013, when the stock market rallied after a poor jobs report, he argued that the reaction to the jobs report was a bad sign for the nation’s future. According to Santelli, a market that would react so much to so little was doomed to suffer for it.
“See, those people aren’t working. They’re not buying houses, they’re not buying cars. They’re using services, they may be using entitlements or welfare. You can’t hide those millions of people forever. So we wonder why we see our costs to take care of people who are in between jobs rising faster than other areas, less improvement in the economy, not good GDP, that’s why. You can’t play this three card monte game for long. And to see the stock market rally on crappy data to me is just a horrible dynamic. What are we, a banana republic?” he asked.
As the discussion with other CNBC contributors continued, Santelli continued his complaints. “I don’t give a blankety-blank who caused it or why the trend is going, but I know one thing for sure: if these continued trends on demographics, participation rate continue, there’s going to be like 50 people supporting the country.”