i didn't see it written anywhere we we would like a comment from shit for brains 
Financial and economic commentary
In the period preceding the Late-2000s recession, Stein made frequent and vehement claims that the economy was not in recession, and that the issues in the housing market would not affect the broader economy. 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]
In an August 12, 2007 column in the New York Times titled "Chicken Little’s Brethren, on the Trading Floor", Stein, while acknowledging "I don’t know where the bottom is on subprime. I don’t know how bad the problems are at Bear (Bear Stearns)" claimed that "subprime losses are wildly out of all proportion to the likely damage to the economy from the subprime problems," and "(t)his economy is extremely strong. Profits are superb. The world economy is exploding with growth. To be sure, terrible problems lurk in the future: a slow-motion dollar crisis, huge Medicare deficits and energy shortages. But for now, the sell-off seems extreme, not to say nutty. Some smart, brave people will make a fortune buying in these days, and then we’ll all wonder what the scare was about."[26] That week, the Dow Jones closed at 13,239.54; as of August 2011, the market has yet to return to this level.[27]
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.[28] 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.[28]
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."[29]
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.[30] 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.
However, Salmon continues to make criticism of Stein a regular feature of his blog.
Business commentator Henry Blodgett wrote a piece for Business Insider in January 2008 entitled "Ben Stein is an Idiot," stating that Stein's criticism of those with bearish views and positions on the market was either "delusional," or a deliberate and "shrewd" attempt to create false controversy and drive up web traffic.[31]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Stein________________________
________________________
__
TELL ME AGAIN WHY WE SHOULD LISTEN TO THIS JACKASS?
