On March 18, 2007, in a column for CBS News’ online version of CBS News Sunday Morning, Stein famously proclaimed in the beginning of the subprime mortgage crisis that the foreclosure problem would “blow over and the people who buy now, in due time, will be glad they did,” the economy was “still very strong,” and the “smart money” was “now trying to buy — not sell — as much distressed merchandise” in mortgages as possible.[25]
On August 18, 2007, on Fox News Channel’s Cavuto on Business, Stein appeared with other financial experts dismissing worries of a coming credit crunch.[26] The lone dissenter was Peter Schiff, who predicted that the mortgage sector would create a crisis leading to massive recession, a view that produced laughter from the other experts. Stein strongly recommended investing in then-troubled financial institutions.[26]
Ben Stein: The credit crunch is way overblown. The [financial institutions] are being given away; they’re so unbelievably cheap...The subprime problem is a problem, but it’s a tiny problem in the context of this economy...It’s a buying opportunity, especially for the financials, maybe like I’ve never seen before in my entire life.
[...]
Peter Schiff: This is just getting started. It’s not just subprimes. This is a problem for the entire mortgage industry. It’s not just people with bad credit that committed to mortgages they couldn’t afford. It’s not just people with bad credit who are going to see their home equity vanish... This is going to be an enormous credit crunch...
Neil Cavuto: You must be a laugh-riot at parties.
(LAUGHTER)
[...]
Ben Stein: ...subprime is tiny. Subprime is a tiny, tiny blip.
Peter Schiff: It’s not tiny. And again, it’s not just subprime. It’s the entire mortgage market.
Ben Stein: You’re simply wrong about that... Defaults for the whole mortgage market are tiny.
[...]
Ben Stein: I think stocks will be a heck of a lot higher a year from now than they are now.
Thirteen months later, in the Global Financial Crisis of September 2008, global stock markets crashed, Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were taken over by the US government, AIG was bailed out by the Federal Reserve, Merrill Lynch was sold to Bank of America Corporation, and Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs confirmed that they would become traditional bank holding companies.
In a Yahoo! Finance article written on October 17, 2008, Stein explained that his understanding of the debt obligations based on real estate loans was less than the “staggeringly large” amount of obligations that were created through trade in derivatives of those, and so why it wasn’t as similar to collapse of junk bond empire in early 1990s as he’d thought it would be: “Where I missed the boat was not realizing how large were the CDS [credit default swaps] based on the junk mortgage bonds.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Stein
Holy cow! Could a person be off the mark anymore than Stein was on just about every damned thing?! I had no idea he was that clueless! I thought he was a pretty sharp guy! Man oh man was I off the mark as well!
Thanks for enlightening me!
Ya think Benny was out putting his money where his mouth was telling us to put ours? Must not have since he doesn’t seem to be flat broke.