he has been wrong about alot of things,but in his slight defense
he called the 87 crash and to go long in march 2009 right before we
bottomed.The best part is can anyone give me a Bull economist that
has called a crash,or been right more??
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.
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.
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yes
everything....
Posted by honzer on 26th of Oct 2011 at 12:27 pm
he has been wrong about alot of things,but in his slight defense he called the 87 crash and to go long in march 2009 right before we bottomed.The best part is can anyone give me a Bull economist that has called a crash,or been right more??
yes
Posted by meaghan on 26th of Oct 2011 at 12:29 pm
Ben Stein, Bueller, Bueller anyone ?
are you sure,i end with this
Posted by honzer on 26th of Oct 2011 at 12:36 pm
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: