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Title: Ben Stein, Predatory Bait-and-Switch Merchant
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Published: Jul 18, 2009
Author: Felix Salmon
Post Date: 2009-07-18 10:02:41 by tom007
Keywords: None
Views: 147
Comments: 5
Ben Stein, Predatory Bait-and-Switch Merchant 6 comments by: Felix Salmon July 16, 2009 Felix Salmon picture Felix Salmon Follow 1060 Followers 0 Following You are currently following Felix Salmon Stop Following You are no longer following Felix Salmon About this author: * Felix Salmon's articles on Seeking Alpha * Felix's blog at Reuters * Subscribe to RSS feed back to yahoo finance add to my yahoo back to cake * Font Size: * Print * Email * TweetThis How far has Ben Stein sunk? Far enough that I feel compelled to resuscitate the Ben Stein Watch, just to share this unfunny and positively harmful TV ad which is now being aired: TV AD NOT SHOWN “I went to freescore.com and found out my score for free”, says Ben, while an annoying squirrel holds up a sign with the word “FREE” in some horrible brush-script font. A few points are worth noting here. First, the score itself is not very useful to consumers. What’s useful is the report — if there’s an error on the report, then the consumer can try to rectify it. Secondly, and much more importantly, if you want a free credit report, there’s only one place to go: annualcreditreport.com. That’s the place where the big three credit-rating agencies will give you a genuinely free copy of your credit report once a year, as required by federal law. You won’t be surprised to hear that freescore.com is not free: in order to get any information out of them at all, you have to authorize them to charge you a $29.95 monthly fee. They even extract a dollar out of you up front, just to make sure that money is there. Stein, here, has become a predatory bait-and-switch merchant, dangling a “free” credit report in front of people so that he can sock them with a massive monthly fee for, essentially, doing nothing at all. Naturally, the people who take him up on this offer will be those who can least afford it. The level to which Stein has now sunk is more than enough reason — as if the case for the prosecution weren’t damning enough already — for the NYT to cancel Stein’s contract forthwith. It’s simply unconscionable for a newspaper of record to employ as its “Everybody’s Business” columnist someone who is surely making a vast amount of money by luring the unsuspecting into overpaying for a financial product they should under no circumstances buy. It’ll also be interesting to see whether the new Consumer Financial Protection Agency will have the authority to regulate this kind of advertising. If it doesn’t, that’s a significant hole in its mandate. Related Articles
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#1. To: All (#0)
BS is lothesome, and a jewish supremist.
"Satan / Cheney in "08" What? he couldn't get the Depends gig?
Really? I've always liked him. He bashed Goldman before Tabibi...
“The blacks are very vain but in the Negroes’ way, and so talkative that they must be driven apart with thrashings.” -- Immanuel Kant “I’m apt to suspect the negroes to be naturally inferior to the whites.” -- David Hume Keep in mind that Stein handed out advice to buy stocks for years before someone finally just asked him if he invested in any of the stocks he recommended. Stein then admitted he kept his money in ordinary mutual funds. Here is a video showing Peter Schiff predicting the 2008 meltdown in detail, being ridiculed by Stein and others. Right up until the collapse became undeniable, I saw Stein and other stock wonks peddling Merrill Lynch and other failed banks as the best investments of all time. By this time, they had to actually put a notice on the screen that Stein actually owned some Merrill stock (not disclosing whether it was just part of his mutual fund). Stein was saying Merrill was such a bargain, they might as well give it away in cereal boxes. The article lets Stein off far too lightly. The man is a criminal and should be in prison. These so-called "analysts" are clearly operating in a Ponzi scheme with the investment banks.
I remember that. BS was disgusting. Nothings changed since.
"Satan / Cheney in "08" 
#2. To: tom007 (#1)
#3. To: tom007 (#1)
BS is lothesome, and a jewish supremist.
#4. To: tom007 (#0)
(Edited)
#5. To: TooConservative (#4)
being ridiculed by Stein and others.
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