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." ^{[28 ]}

For these and other perceived errors, Stein has been criticized by other economic writers. Beginning in September 2007, economic blogger  Felix Salmon had a feature on his  Portfolio.com "Market Movers" blog entitled "Ben Stein Watch," which deconstructed his weekly New York Times opinion columns and generally found them wanting in economic insight. ^{[29 ]}  After moving to  Reuters.com, Salmon announced that he would end the Ben Stein Watch feature, explaining:

By the time I left Portfolio, the Ben Stein Watch archives... amounted to 60 separate blog entries, totaling 33,776 words. And although they were popular, they never achieved their stated aim: Stein is still writing for the NYT. But I’m putting the BSW to an end right now. One reason is that Stein’s columns have ceased to be infuriating to me: instead they tend to lie somewhere between boring and incomprehensible. Another reason is that if Stein couldn’t get himself fired from the NYT for making Expelled , there’s simply no way that a lone blogger is going to have any effect.