Let America Get Back To Work!': Santelli Explodes During Panel Discussion on the Fed's Easy-Money Policies & Unemployment

Not one to shy away from voicing his opinion, CNBC's Rick Santelli on Friday clashed with his colleagues over topics that included Quantitative Easing, unemployment, and Fed’s supposed plan to revive the U.S. economy.

“Five years into this crisis, I think it’s all disappointing,” Santelli said, referring to recovery's slow pace. “It would take five years at the present job rate to get to where we were before the crisis.”

Indeed, as noted earlier on TheBlaze, although today’s unemployment numbers are heartening, there's still a lot a work that needs to be done before we can get back to pre-recession employment levels:

Planet Money. (Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics. Credit: Lam Thuy Vo/NPR).

“There is no crisis!” Santelli continued, taking issue with the Federal Reserve’s open-ended commitment to monthly purchases of $85 billion dollars worth of bonds. “Why they’re still in crisis mode is beyond belief and I think it’s wrong.”

“Rick,” CNBC senior economics reporter Steve Liesman interjected, “Some 7.7 percent of the population is unemployed. The U6 is 14.3 percent and that’s part of the problem there, Rick. There is a crisis! There’s a crisis of unemployment in this country.”

Santelli countered by asking how the Fed has addresses this problem. Liesman answered by saying that it has responded in “the only way it knows how,” a remark that prompted Santelli to accuse the Fed of experimenting with nation’s economy.

“I don’t think we should have that experiment,” Santelli said.

“We should,” Liesman answered back. “We should have an experiment to put people back to work.”

The conversation became increasingly tense (as is normally the case when Liesman and Santelli butt heads).

“Let America get back to work the way that country has put people back to work ever since it started to be the shining light on top of the hill without all this micromanaging, European-style banking!” Santelli passionately argued.

From there, the two hit an impasse: Santelli bemoaning the fact that the economy has been put under “parental guidance” and Liesman arguing that there is no other way to bring it back to life.

It’s all definitely worth a watch:

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Featured image screen grab.