Quote from Son of a Gann:
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[23]. 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[23].
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.
A year and a month 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 finance.yahoo.com 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 got created through trade in derviatives 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 based on the junk mortgage bonds."