Here's the video of Neil Cavuto vs. Ben Stein

[rational thinker]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAEAMJ76KHk

[ClayTrainor]

thanks man, this should be good :D

[Kludge]

Well done!

[ClayTrainor]

wow, that was amazing...

Do you think Ron Paul is having an influence on public opinion? Cavuto was pretty much using Ron Paul talking points.

[Kludge]

I'm sure he is, but Cavuto's always been RELATIVELY libertarian.

[lodge939]

is there more than that? that was awesome, but I want to see Charles Payne rant about "money printing"

[malkusm]

Well it's unfortunate that Cavuto and company didn't set him right on the economic policy of the Great Depression. I'm not an expert on it, but from what I know the problem was the intervention of the government, not the lack thereof.

[frasu]

damn, it's like watching a cage full of frustrated monkeys... all those guys 4 months ago were laughing at the idea of depression or crissis... just ridiculous

thanks for the much awaited youtube

[nobody's_hero]

Many thanks.

I didn't realize this involved more than Cavuto and Stein.

Let's get everyone at Fox news strangling each other so we can separate the fiscal conservatives from the neo-con lap-dogs, lol.

Neil Cavuto wins Ben Stein's money in this interview!

[ninepointfive]

Although his memory is made of a sponge, Ben Stein is one of the biggest idiots around.

[wd4freedom]

I just kept hearing "Bueller.... Bueller......" over and over again.

[tonesforjonesbones]

usuary is evil. period. that caused the whole thing. we were warned about usuary. tones

[roho76]

If I must watch FOX I would hope it's Cavuto. He isn't always perfect but every time I see him he gets a little better. Thanks for the vid.

[smartguy911]

thank you..

the black dude, i remember him from past videos saying everything in the economy is fine and look at him now...

[awake]

Go Cavuto!

[angelatc]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAEAMJ76KHk

You are my hero of the day, sir!

[AJ Antimony]

Thank you for the video, I never knew Ben Stein was such a moron

[Maverick]

My favorite part so far:

Stein: "The Federal Government has to stabilize this economy!"

Cavuto: "NO IT DOESN'T!!"

:D

By the way, I don't think Stein is the only one with a memory leak. I remember back when the DOW was 14,000+ points and Cavuto was on every day praising Bush and the neo-cons "free-market" policies for it. Guess he hadn't learned about inflation or the Fed bubbles yet, huh?

[mport1]

Haha, great. Ben got schooled.

[Kotin]

Oh god yes!

[Grimnir Wotansvolk]

I see Ben's got a bad case of the Nader lip

[anaconda]

Stein is dead wrong about the Federal government rescuing the economy. I enjoyed his movie about academic freedom recently. Ben appears to be a highly intelligent man but he needs to take Econ 1A and Econ 100.

[thasre]

So, on FOX, we've had Napolitano for a while, and it looks like Cavuto's coming around to the Ron Paul side of things... maybe we can take over FOX news!

Seriously, though, I'm glad to see that Neil Cavuto, who has alway been a real nerve-grater for me, is one of the only people you see on the news who's unabashedly standing up for common sense in this whole mess.

[Nate K]

Cavuto gets my email of appreciation.

[Andrew Ryan]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAEAMJ76KHk
I love you

[Matt Collins]

wow.. I've never seen Ben Stein have that much energy before. But I just lost all respect for him after he just advocated the federal government bail everyone out.

Pathetic.

[malkusm]

Well this didn't surprise me, considering I read this by Ben Stein a week ago on Yahoo! Finance:

http://finance.yahoo.com/expert/article/yourlife/122582;_ylt=AiKsHj40TQK_G018C8cffwlO7sMF

[Deborah K]

Ben Stein definitely needs a history lesson.

[reduen]

Thanks for the link here and Ben is wrong here for sure.

[t0rnado]

This moron hasn't been to a science class, a history class, or an economics class.

[jyakulis]

just read that stein yahoo finance article. what a bum.

'The sums involved will be substantial, but tiny compared with the losses to the world if we slide into a world wide depression. I offer as an example that it might have cost the government about $30 billion to $60 billion to save Lehman. That was deemed too expensive. The losses to the U.S. from the panic caused by that blunder are on the order of $4 trillion to $ 5 trillion. This is what is at stake if we do not spend the hundreds of billions and maybe a trillion or more to reflate the economy now."


it wasn't real wealth that was lost. it was an artificially created bubble that burst. the assets didn't disappear. secondly, how does he even know how much it would of cost. they had 100's of billions of dollars of bad debt.

[jyakulis]

these comments in the ben stein article are priceless. look at this guy:

Inflation? YES, Please. My wife and I just signed a mortgage much like my parents and grandparents did when they were our age (mid/late 20s). Both of their generations had a spirt of inflation to help their net worth grow. How about a little inflation for me?


buwhahahahah

wtf is he talking about

[jyakulis]

here's some more little gems:

"absolutely, the economy needs expansion and increase in dollars circulating. I would put an effort lock in all loans to be fixed interest rate, and then let us deal with a modest inflation which will rise reduce debt/equity rations on houses for most americans"

"Don't let the idiots attacking you here get you down. You are right. They are letting various bias interfere and blind their reasoning powers, if they possess any. The only cure for deflation is inflation, as surely as the only way to fill a pothole is put something in it. These idiots would be screaming, "No, if they wore a pothole into the road, let them break an axle!" The one stipulation I'd add is the reflation of economy MUST be done grassroots level, to the people, to the taxpayers, not tossing all of the good money after bad at corporate and banking levels. Citizens may hoard cash, but not as bad as the banks will. Instead put the cash to the people and let the corporations and banks chase after it, like they are supposed to do."



"Right on. Don't buy into the "free market solves all" hype. It's time to scale back; work together again. It's not the same as the depression. The US is a competitor now in the world economy. Other nations will use the government to strengthen their economy and we must do the same."


"You're right-on again Ben. Those that don't understrand our serious economic issues see little difficulty ahead. let alone the road to a worldwide depression. People are about as knowledgeable about our economy as they were about most election issues. We are in very serious trouble and those who disagreee with you will only "see the light" after a horrible period of long darkness."

"Yeah, he is right again. The long bond is up telling us there is indeed the deflation risk. The inflection point of spending has past and now we are a country of savers. The problem is for every percent of GDP we save we lose 4% in spending. No spending = a crappy economy."

"I don't often agree with Mr. Stein, but in this article he is dead on. Most economists, especially the ones who have studied the great depression, vociferously recommend large capital injections and liberal monetary policies. We have to spend our way out of this. Free market does not have the ability to handle this without great help from big brother."

[tajitj]

They do not think long term. Throwing as much money as possible at it now may stop the collapse, we all agree. But you just make the real collapse worse, the fall of the dollar. Dr. Paul knows this. He explained the recent strengthing of the dollar perfect. People are getting worried, getting out of stocks and raising capital, ei dollars. That is the only reason for the rise in demand. Soon that money will start going back into oil and gold when they realize they do not want to have cash.

Guys like Stein and the talking heads on financial TV never look long term.

[tsopranos]

I wanna see Schiff and Stein go at it! That would make for some nice fireworks.

[jyakulis]

I wanna see Schiff and Stein go at it! That would make for some nice fireworks.

they did once already. stein was telling everyone how cheap merill lynch was at like 70 dollars a share. it was quite hilarious.

[james1906]

I miss the good ol' days when Ben Stein at least required you to answer a few trivia questions to get his money. His old sidekick hosted the AMAs tonight and he's on Fox News getting his ass chewed. Funny how life works out.

Anyone find the black dude funny? He's also chewing out Stein, but he was the one this year saying Washington Mutual was the stock to buy.

[raiha]

Dunno who Ben Stein is but he certainly thinks he's right. Cavuto was great except when he said "it's a real fact". Well wHAT other kind of fact is there???:confused:

[Danke]

http://market-ticker.org/archives/664-Ben-Steins-Idiocy.html

Posted by Karl Denninger
Ben Stein's Idiocy

Ben Stein needs to be locked up - or BBQd and eaten - for penning this article:

In this situation, the governments that care about their citizens should and must have extremely expansive policies. That would include running very large deficits — which we are doing, not even mentioning tax hikes until the situation is stabilized, and possibly cutting taxes as a temporary measure. Public works projects, tax rebates, even to people who paid no taxes, extensions of unemployment insurance payments — all of these are necessary. Bailing out the big auto companies, offering loan guarantees to encourage banks to lend, making sure lending facilities are in place for credit card issuers - all of these should be done and immediately.

"Mr" Stein is an ass - and that's being polite.

This sort of "beggar thy neighbor" concept - that is, mass and intentional devaluation of one's currency (what else do you think happens if you "reflate" by throwing money around?) is precisely how we wind up with a hyperinflationary depression, which is far worse than a deflationary one.

Deflationary depressions are nasty business, but they are created by governments who attempt to stimulate economies beyond the point of reasonable credit and business growth, thereby guaranteeing a deflationary bust.

Mr. Stein was NOT, if I recall correctly, one of the people who sounded the warning back in 2000-03 about the excesses in credit growth nor did he advocate stopping that stupidity - going all the way back to the 1980s! In short, where was his objection to creating the mess in the first place?

Missing, that's where. In fact I distinctly remember Mr. Stein being unabashedly bullish back in January of 2008. Indeed, here's what he said January 4th of this year:

This isn't a development to strike terror into your hearts -- if you're a long-term investor, it signals a time to buy. (As I've said many times, if you're a short-term investor you can just skip my column.) The history of stock market investing is unequivocal on this point: When the market is low, when the economy is in a recession, it is -- in the long run -- by far the best time to buy.

Such a wonderful record you have there Mr. Stein! Why, you'd only have lost what - 40% of your money listening to this buttclown (the SPX was at 1440, more or less, on the date that column was published, down ~125 pts from its top! That was a time to buy?!)

Hyperinflationary depressions are worse than deflationary ones, because a hyperinflationary depression almost always results in political failure. For examples you can look at Weimar Germany or Argentina, both of which resulted in the destruction of what were democratic political systems, right up until the government decided to take Mr. Stein's general approach.

Let's look at some more from Stein's most-recent piece of stupidity:

I desperately hope I am wrong and I may well be, but the government has to put in a bottom here. Otherwise, the bottom is very hard to see. Again, I hope very much I am being too pessimistic.

Government created this mess by removing leverage limits and blocking state enforcement of predatory lending laws. In 2004, specifically, our present Treasury Secretary lobbied as CEO of Goldman Sachs for the removal of one of the last safeties on the nuclear credit weapons, obtained his requested change, and in doing so set the timer on the bombs. Where is Mr. Stein's call for the people responsible for this to be recognized, outed and punished?

NOWHERE, that's where. In fact if you read Mr. Stein's writings archived over on Yahoo Finance you will find unabashedly bullish BS all the way down the pipe, until he finally got hit over the head with a Clue-By-Four.

How long did it take Ben? Was it when YOUR retirement accounts got clobbered for 40% of their value that you finally woke the hell up?

And how does one avoid taking the pain that results from setting off a firecracker in your hand once you've lit it and it explodes?

Let's continue:

If workers can only rely on dividend and interest income and not on long-term capital gains of 8% or 9% per annum, pre-retirees have to save enormously more than they had anticipated to adequately fund their retirement. This is serious business.

No kidding! You mean that spending more than you make and betting on silly credit expansion - that is, granting loans to people when you have no reasonable expectation of ability to pay, isn't a valid and appropriate strategy?

Gee, who'd have thought that you should actually save 10-20% of your income toward retirement instead of spending it (plus even more money you don't have!) on IPods, cruises and Hummers?

Finally, he says that because we can't expect people to behave prudently, he calls for:

This makes reflation even more desperately needed. I hope Mr. Bush will wake up, stop listening to Dr. Evil, his Treasury Secretary, Henry Paulson, and work with President-Elect Obama to get a large, serious stimulation package into the economic bloodstream pronto.

This is getting ugly.

The ugly part is listening to you Mr. Stein.

Advocating the impossible is puerile and idiotic, and that you managed to find an audience in Congress to spew this crap today in the context of the automaker bailout hearings is even more stupid.

If you're dumb enough to listen to someone who has this sort of public, easily-accessed record of accuracy you are better off with paying a weatherman to guide your investment and economic strategy. The weatherman, after all, is right about whether it will rain at least half the time!

There is apparently some "backlash" to my idea of boycotting the automakers if they get bailed out, with people wondering where my anger was at Wall Street. Gee, have 'ya read any of what I've written for the last year and a half folks? The tens of thousands of dollars I've spent trying to stop this crap? I've advocated what amounts to a personal credit boycott the entire time, have advocated that people look into whether it makes sense to walk away from their underwater homes, and have advocated other actions that amount to personal acts of retrenchment that will punish those who did unsound (and I'd argue evil) things in the context of Wall Street securitization and the credit bubble.

Funny how people want an exemption when the anger against bailouts extends to them, eh?

This, by the way, is one of the reasons that the idiocy of Wall Street (and Main Street) requires leadership from Washington to stop, and if its not forthcoming we will see the destruction of our economy.

EVERYONE is against bailouts - until its their pet industry, firm, or region that is going to be bailed out.

Then the bleating and even threats begin.

Congress needs to let the adults into the room and banish the mouth-breathers who have consistently been wrong since the beginning of this mess, acting as an adult to remove the punch bowl and force the detox process that will purge excessive credit creation from the system.

You want to know why the market keeps going down? Why various support levels keep falling, and the stock market, while it has sharp rallies from time to time, remains in a confirmed downtrend? Why your 401k keeps shrinking?

It is happening because government keeps changing the rules and there is still no transparency nor is there any reasonable belief there will be any going forward, and the bleating continues to produce "free money" - which the market fully-understands is in fact not free.

As a consequence there is no way for anyone to value companies and industries on a clean, transparent basis. Neither I or anyone else can determine if a given company, whether it be a bank or industrial concern, is fairly priced, overpriced, or underpriced in the stock market.

When I cannot determine the value of a company the only price at which I am willing to buy (as a stockholder) is for pennies, spreading my bets around with "stink bids" while being willing to be wrong at least half the time - because all I'm doing is guessing.

There is no floor on valuations and thus prices because there is no way to derive an honest understanding of underlying value!

I have said this all along - so long as the government continues to meddle in this fashion the market is going to continue to fall, because literally every sector of the market is potentially subject to the same sort of crap! So as each sector comes under suspicion it is taken out and sold and the market goes down further.

The private sources of money that, for example, came in to do a deal with Goldman or Citibank got screwed by the government and they will not be coming back.

The stupidity of our government agencies in this regard has destroyed the analytical foundation in our equity markets and investors have sold out as a consequence of their inability to derive fair metrics for any firm in the United States, along with the intentional destruction of private equity investments. Examples? Dick Bove's "generational buy" call in the financials. Look at the XLF since then - you've lost more than HALF YOUR MONEY listening to him; in May the XLF, the financial sector ETF, was over $25, today it broke $11!

I said at the time his call was idiotic as there was no possible way for him to derive an honest valuation and thus there was absolutely no possible way for anyone to know what a fair market price was for these firms.

Read what I said at the time in full; or the condensed version:

"The Truth: The "powers that be" (including the media, The Fed and The Banks) are absolutely beside themselves with the possibility that stocks, especially bank stocks, might decline in value. For "why" see the top of this blog entry. If you fall for this you will be wiped out. DICK BOVE PUT A MARKET PERFORM RATING ON BEAR STEARNS STOCK ON MARCH 11th - JUST THREE DAYS BEFORE IT BLEW UP AND (THE FOLLOWING MONDAY) WENT TO $2! You have NOT and you WILL NOT see CNBC or DICK BOVE take responsibility for the wipe out of SEVERAL BILLION DOLLARS IN SHAREHOLDER WEALTH - when he could have preserved YOUR MONEY if he had told you the truth about our financial institutions and that YOU SHOULD SELL ALL OF THEM AS THERE ARE AND WILL BE MORE EXPLOSIONS, ALTHOUGH NEITHER HE OR I HAVE NO WAY TO KNOW WHICH ONES AND NEITHER DO ANY OF THE ANALYSTS SINCE WE CAN'T SEE HONEST BALANCE SHEETS!"

Who was right, six months later, judged objectively?

At the same time the machinations of the Treasury and Federal Reserve have destroyed liquidity in the credit markets and introduced insane distortions where investors have "front run" expected bailouts and handouts, then fled instantly when it becomes apparent that their bet wasn't going to work out. This has produced repeated dislocations in the credit markets with the latest being the asset-backed credit market (ABX and CMBX) when Treasury suddenly repudiated the stated purpose of the EESA/TARP.

These dislocations are not "natural outcomes" - they are the direct and proximate product of government interference with what should have been forced into the open and resolved last fall.

Recessions are the natural product of business "exuberance", but Depressions are caused by government interference with the normal and necessary recessionary adjustment process.

Thanks Washington; I now expect and am preparing for a Depression, and it is specifically due to your actions that it is going to come to pass.

It is Washington's willful refusal to force full and complete transparency in the Capital Markets, instead extending ever-more TARPs and other means of obfuscation, including "23A" letters, "bank secrecy" among and in The Fed, along with intentional distortions in the credit markets that have "crowded out" private capital and caused it to flee that now threaten this nation and indeed the world with an Economic Depression.

We're not alone, of course. Our idiocy is shared with the rest of the world, who if anything have done even more stupid things than us! The leverage in European banks is, believe it or not, actually higher than ours, and they are more opaque!

But that other people are drinking gasoline does not give you license to take a nip off a bottle of antifreeze under the argument that its "less harmful" to drink the glycol in comparative terms, when both will kill you very dead!

The Treasury, ABX and CMBX market today all continue to have their "pointers" aimed straight at economic depression, literally worsening by the hour. There is every reason to believe we are on the precipice of a deflationary credit collapse that will make the 1930-32 bond market dislocation look like a cakewalk.

Washington must stop and in fact reverse this idiocy here and now before our economy lawn-darts into the ground at 600mph.

[PhantomSTi]

It's interesting that Ben Stein would advocate this kind of stuff, and then him talking about Depression. You can't have a depression unless there's a sharp contraction in the money supply e.g. Federal Reserve creating that issue.

[lodge939]

Ben Stein was hammering Bush's stimulus package that he did earlier this year, and now he supports the Obama stimulus? he's losing it

[anaconda]

Look, Stein is simply being clueless. First of all the Abrahms Tank is made by General Dynamics. PLUS if the friggin crappy auto companies with their bloated union contracts were allowed to fail then they could be reorganized for military purposes or they could keep viable the portion of their manufacturing base that was appropriate for military applications. Stein seems to think that if the companies go bust that they have to somehow plow under all of the factories. What gives with his reasoning?