Idiot columnists

In today’s Times, columnist Ben Stein writes, ” Almost no one (except Mr. Buffett) saw this coming, at least not on this scale.”

Stein certainly didn’t see it coming. A year ago, he pooh poohed the mortgage crisis in a column titled “its time to take a deep breath,”

Yes, there are real problems: housing, mortgage defaults, losses at financial firms, rot in hedge funds. But over all, things will be fine. Unless there is a genuine dollar crisis or a devastating recession (very unlikely), things will work out. This economy is very big and very solid. It cannot be derailed for long by anything we have seen lately. If I were the editor of the business section for just one day, I would run one immense headline: ‘Everything Is Going to Be Fine. Go Back to Work.’At that time (in a post titled “Creeping to collapse“) I wrote, “It will be fun to watch what Stein writes when the Dow is plumetting towards 8,000, rather than 13,000.” Well, now we know.