Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently put to the blog at this site:
We are all responsible for our own financial decisions.
There are millions of people who were in the process of planning retirements during the years 2002 through 2013. We “knew” as a society at that time that the Old School safe withdrawal rate studies got the numbers wildly wrong. Yet the millions of people who were planning retirements did not “know” this. Why? Because the Buy-and-Hold Mafia was employing death threats, board bannings, tens of thousands of acts of defamation and threats to get academic researchers fired from their jobs to stop those millions of people from learning what they need to know.
Who is responsible for the losses, Pink? Who pays the bill?
The millions of middle-class people did the right thing. They didn’t act foolishly. They went on the internet to see what the peer-reviewed academic research says. They did all they possibly could do, no?
So why were they taken? Because the Buy-and-Hold Mafia did not use its power and money and influence to get those studies corrected as soon as possible. It instead used its power and money and influence to COVER UP the errors in those studies.
Now –
They can’t pay the bill. There is not enough money to pay the bill. So those people are going to suffer in horrible, horrible ways. They will be left destitute. In their old age. With no resources. After lifetimes of productive work. Because they did the right thing. Because they listened to the Wall Street Con Men who are promoted 24/7 on television and radio and newspapers and on the internet.
If you are capable of imagining a scenario in which the people who led the cover-up don’t go to prison for a long. long time, then you are capable of imagining something that I am not capable of imagining, Pink.
I certainly wish you all the best that this life has to offer a person, in any event.
Rob
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