Rick Santelli

Rick Santelli is an editor for the CNBC Business News network. He joined CNBC as an on-air editor on June 14, 1999, reporting primarily from the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade. He was formerly the vice president for an institutional trading and hedge fund account for futures-related products. He is also credited with being a catalyst in the early formation of the Tea Party movement via a statement he made on February 19, 2009.

Early life

The grandson of four Italian immigrants, Santelli was born near Taylor Street in Chicago's old Italian neighborhood and at age 6 moved with his family to Lombard, Illinois. After graduating from Willowbrook High School in Villa Park, Illinois, Santelli graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and was a member of the Alpha Sigma Phi fraternity.

Career

In the early 1980s Santelli got an up-close-and-personal education in futures trading, foreign exchange and customer relations from his then mentor and employer, RJ Abrams. Abrams filled customer orders in the Japanese Yen pit at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange for all the major brokerage houses, most of which no longer exist. Santelli's job was to keep customer orders, mostly entered on paper via Telex machines arranged according to price and to interface with customers.