TPMMuckraker

Newly Unemployed CNBC Star Dylan Ratigan Joins Class Struggle

Moe Tkacik April 10, 2009, 3:01 PM

Has former CNBC anchor Dylan Ratigan joined the leftist alliance lobbying the right-leaning business network to send its staff to re-education camp?

It didn’t exactly seem that way when he abruptly left the channel two weeks ago over what appeared to be his contention that he deserved more money than network execs wanted to pay. In fact, after a few days off the former Fast Money host seemed downright baffled that strangers would associate his grievances with those of Tom Frank and Jon Stewart. “Ever since this started,” he told CBS Marketwatch columnist Jon Friedman, “people think I’m some kind of [swear word ending in -ing] Che Guevara!”

Well, welcome to the insurgency, Dylan! Today he tells Henry Blodget of a consciousness-raising moment he experienced during the crisis…

A lot of things came together. One, it became apparent to me that there had been some major policy failures in America. While clearly pursuable at a place like CNBC, in my opinion, they are more broadly pursuable from a wide variety of other news platforms…When you’re dealing with systemic policy failures that have rendered a catastrophe the likes of which we’ve really never seen, the role of journalism is to ask questions of money and power from the broadest possible platform.

As opposed to, you know, showing up to work every day to moderate a vigorous debate over whether the latest bear market rally has the legs to last two days or six. And speaking of which, he’s got a stock tip:

Blodget: Last question. You’ve been right in the middle of this meltdown day after day, interviewing the smartest people, etc. So is this a new bull market, or is this another suckers’ rally?
Ratigan: Suckers’ rally. No question. That’s not an indictment of the judgment of the market. That’s just my perception of the ability of the banks to function in a timely fashion, the ability to create meaningful amounts of jobs in the immediate future, and the as-yet unrecognized meaningful losses to come in commercial real-estate and other asset classes… We’ve gone through a transition where things were getting bad in a freefall, and now they’re just getting slowly worse.

For his part, Ratigan is involuntarily unemployed for the time being due to a clause in his contract that bars him from moving to a competing network for six months, and while we’ve had our differences we wish him the best. Misery loves ideological company.