HUGE thanks to Josh Brown for reminding us that yesterday was the five year anniversary of one of the most infamous business columns of all time: When Ben Stein ripped Goldman Sachs economist Jan Hatzius for being bearish on housing.

Everyone needs to go back and read the column for a couple reasons.

One, it's a good reminder of how ridiculous it was that Ben Stein was writing about economics for The New York Times.

This paragraph is just amazingly pompous, mocking Hatzius for his Oxford degree over an assessment that turned out to be 100% correct:

Dr. Hatzius, who has a Ph.D. in economics from “Oggsford,” as they put it in “The Great Gatsby,” used a combination of theory, data, guesswork, extrapolation and what he recalls as history to reach the point that when highly leveraged institutions like banks lost money on subprime, they would cut back on lending to keep their capital ratios sound—and this would slow the economy.

This would occur, he said, if the value of the assets that banks hold plunges so steeply that they have to consume their own capital to patch up losses. With those funds used to plug holes, banks’ reserves drop further. To keep reserves in accordance with regulatory requirements, banks then have to rein in lending. What all of this means—or so the argument goes—is that losses in subprime and elsewhere that are taken at banks ultimately boomerang back, in a highly multiplied and negative way, onto our economy.

As the narrator in the rock legend “Spill the Wine” says, “This really blew my mind.”

He then accused Hatzius of merely being a fearmonger:

In other words, with the greatest possible respect to Dr. Hatzius, his paper is not really what I would call a serious overview of the situation. It is more a call to be afraid and cautious based on general principles that he embraces and not on the lessons of history. (In this respect, he is much like many economic journalists and commentators who sell newsprint by selling fear. The common cause of journalists and Wall Streeters in this regard is a subject I will address in the future.)

And then he accused of Hatzius of just talking Goldman's book:

Why, then, is his document circulating? Perhaps as a token of Dr. Hatzius’s genuine intelligence, which is fine. But to me, his paper seemed like a selling document in the real Wall Street sense of selling — namely, selling short. (Dr. Hatzius notes that he has long been bearish on housing, since faraway 2006, but I respectfully note that that is a lot different from predicting a credit catastrophe. The spokesman for Goldman also noted the company’s bearishness on housing since 2006. He also noted that in the recent past, Goldman Sachs has moved to a considerably larger short posture and that the firm is net short.)

Of course, Stein was way ahead of the curve in terms of baseless Goldman conspiracy-mongering, but in this case, he took on the worst possible target.

The other reason you should read this is it's a great reminder of how awesome Hatzius has been throughout this whole crisis. Hatzius recently came out with a call saying that the period of sub-trend growth that we've seen ever since the crisis began would soon come to an end. But he is no perma-optimist. He was getting mocked for being bearish, and now he's seeing things getting better. That flexibility is a great testament to him as an economist.