Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently put to another blog entry at this site:
I would also say that Jack, Larry, Bill and Rick would speak out as well.
Jack Bogle and Larry Swedroe and Bill Bernstein and Rick Ferri certainly all have goodness in them and all four of these individuals certainly have shown on numerous occasions that they would like to come clean.
Jack Bogle said in his book that Reversion to the Mean is an “Iron Law” of stock investing. That’s how I knew that there was zero chance that the Old School retirement studies got the numbers right. Jack sprinkles honest observations about how stock investing works in with the smelly Buy-and-Hold garbage ALL THE TIME. If there were no good in him and no desire in him to come clean, why would he do this?
Bill Bernstein was honest when Ataloss asked him whether the Old School retirement studies were analytically invalid, as I have claimed since the morning of May 13, 2002. He said that any aspiring retiree who gave a second’s thought to using on of this studies to plan a retirement had to be out of his or her mind. That’s pretty darn honest! He also included a dishonest statement in his response, saying that even though there was zero chance that the studies could get the numbers right, they were analytically valid all the same. So he covered his tracks with the Get Rich Quickers and they permitted him to continue making a living in this field. It remains the case that he included some honest stuff in that e-mail and that that took courage on Bill’s part.
Larry Swedroe was so honest at one time that he got himself banned from the Bogleheads Forum! Again, that shows that there is some goodness in him and that he would like to come clean about what the last 33 years of peer-reviewed academic research says. Does that overcome the harm he did with his dishonest support for the 12-year cover-up of the errors in the Old School retirement studies? Hardly. But it does show a desire on Larry’s part to do good work, a desire that we will see him acting on on a daily basis once your prison sentence is announced and this all comes out, Anonymous.
We are all on the same side, Anonymous.
Rob
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