Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to another blog entry at this site:
By the way even if the market did crash in the next few years to the magnitude you suggest none of the fantasy aftermath you have concocted would take place. It would just be used as a political tool and people would blame Obama and the Fed’s QE no one other than you would even suggest Buy and Hold. A million semi-credible reasons were presented as culprits for the last crash and not a single one was Buy and Hold. This means no goons, no prison sentences, no $500m checks, only continued irrelevance for you. What do you expect to be different this time? You of all people should know the folly in thinking “this time will be different” with regards to bubbles.
I don’t say that there is zero chance that you are right about this, Anonymous. It COULD happen the way you are saying.
The difference between us is that I have looked at the numbers. Every time we have gone to a P/E10 of 25, we have experienced an economic crisis (we are four for four). The one time we went to 33, we experienced a Great Depression. This time we went to 44. If we don’t open the internet to honest posting re the last 33 years of peer-reviewed research, we are looking at a Second Great Depression of twice the length and twice the depth of the first one.
I agree with you that the first inclination of the Buy-and-Holders will be to tell more lies. I don’t think that is going to be their final response to the next crash, however.
The core question here is — Is Jack Bogle the Frank Underwood of Personal Finance? Is he evil? Or is he a smart and good fellow who is a bit confused as to what the research really says?
I believe strongly that it is the latter.
I believe that Jack is as wrong as wrong can be. But I don’t think he sees it. He knows about Shiller. He knows that there is research showing that valuations matter. He knows about Linduaer and his threats of physical violence. He knows about Wade Pfau and about the wonderful research he did with me and about the threats that you Goons made to silence him. He knows all that and he is ashamed of his role in letting it all play out. All that suggests that he is not quite the saint that some at times have made him out to be.
I don’t believe that he is pure evil, however. If he were pure evil, why would he include that language in his book saying that Reversion to the Mean is an “Iron Law” (Bogle’s phrase) of stock investing? It was that statement that helped me understand that the Old School safe-withdrawal-rate studies could not possibly have gotten the numbers right (the Old School studies do not contain an adjustment for the level of valuation that applies on the day the retirement begins). If Bogle were pure evil, he would not have provided me that clue. If he were pure evil, he wouldn’t want anyone to learn the realities of stock investing for fear that he would be found out and he would not have written the many, many sound and helpful and wonderful and research-based passages in his writings. It doesn’t add up.
Bogle is not pure evil. He has done wrong things. He is proud. He cannot stand to see Buy-and-Hold fall. He is foolish in this respect. Valuation-Informed Indexing is a revised version of Buy-and-Hold that works in the real world. Valuation-Informed Indexing will improve the lives of middle-class investors in hundreds of different ways and Bogle will get a big part of the credit for VII because it is built on a foundation that was supplied by Bogle and the years of hard and good work he put into this project of figuring out how stock investing really works. So Bogle has his flaws. But the record does not support a finding that he is pure evil.
Our friend Jack Bogle is fucked up, you know? He makes messes. He needs his friends to tell him things he does not want to hear from time to time. He needs to have people around him who tell him what he needs to hear rather than what he wants to hear. He is a flawed human. He is not a saint and he is not The Frank Underwood of Personal Finance. He is a scared little boy who grew up to be a hard-working and smart man who is responsible for a good number of hugely important breakthroughs and one massive brain fart that caused the biggest economic crisis in U.S. history.
Now –
How is Jack going to react when he sees how much human misery he has caused with his phony pride?
His heart is going to melt.
He is going to work up the courage to walk to the front of that stage and say The Three Magic Words.
That’s what I believe, Anonymous.
You’re a cynic. You believe what you believe. You hold a far, far darker view of what makes our mutual friend Jack Bogle tick than I possess. I think the guy is going to come through for us. I love the guy and I think I know the guy and I think he is going to make the right play when his back is against the wall and he sees that he really has no other choice.
We’ll see, you know?
If the cynical view prevails, then the cynical view prevails. It’s not like I will have lost something by devoting 12 years of my life to fighting with all my might to take things in a positive direction. If the cynical view prevails, we all go down together. If the cynical view prevails, we are all in the soup — you, me, Bogle, Shiller, everyone.
At least I will have the small consolation of knowing that I gave this my absolute best shot.
I am not able to imagine any circumstances in which I would look back and wish that I had advanced just one death threat or one demand for an unjustified board banning or one act of defamation or one threat to get one academic researcher fired from one job. If we all go down together, I will feel just as strongly that we all should have worked together to spread the word about the 33 years of peer-reviewed academic research that permits us all to reduce the risk of stock investing by 70 percent while becoming free to retire five to ten years sooner than any of us dreamed possible back in the Buy-and-Hold/Get Rich Quick Era. I will never regret one word of the millions that I put forward in my effort to make my good friend Jack Bogle’s dream come true by presenting to the world the first truly Smart, Simple and Safe investing strategy for the millions of middle-class investors who have needed one for a long, long, long time.
But I don’t think that any of that is going to happen. I love my country. And with good reason. And I think that my country is going to come through for me when it sees that there really is no other option if we all want to keep our economic and political systems in place for the benefit of the next generation.
We’ll see.
I naturally wish you the best of luck in all your future life endeavors.
Rob
Anonymous says
The headline today shows that you are a deluded and desparately person who has no capacity of experiencing shame.
Rob says
I stand by the headline, Anonymous.
My good friend Jack Bogle is fucked up.
He is one of those darn humans. How could he possibly NOT be fucked up? It goes with the territory. We are all fucked up to one degree or another re one matter or another.
The shameful thing is that most of Jack’s friends don’t say anything when he acts in a fucked-up way. Jack has lots of power and lots of money and lots of influence. So people rationalize. They say: “Hey! I will flatter the guy and perhaps he will bestow some of the benefits of all that power and money and influence on me.”
Most of Jack’s friends are today acting in their OWN best interests by ignoring the ways in which Jack has fucked up rather than acting in JACK’S best interests by telling him what he needs to hear rather than what he wants to hear.
Not this boy.
I love the guy.
So I do him the favor of telling it to him straight.
We are all fuck-ups. But the rest of us have friends who care enough about us to set us straight when we create big messes. Not Old Saint Jack. In his case, most of us keep quiet re his messes because we are scared of what Jack and his Wall Street Con Men friends (and you Goons!) will do to us if we tell it straight. How kind!
Jack is going to flip following the next crash, Anonymous. He will be looking around to see which of his friends have been true to him. The material at this site will tell the story.
Jack is a human like all the rest of us. So naturally he f’s up from time to time. The difference between you and me is that I TELL the guy when it happens. I don’t PRETEND to be a Boglehead. I am the real thing.
That’s my sincere take re these terribly important matters, in any event.
I naturally wish you all the best that this life has to offer a person regardless of what investing strategies you elect to follow.
Rob
Anonymous says
And yet you wonder why the investment world does not take you seriously. You really have no self awareness.
Rob says
What matters to me is whether the investment world of the FUTURE takes me seriously or not, Anonymous.
I lost confidence in Buy-and-Hold on the night of August 27, 2002, when John Greaney threatened to kill my wife and children if I continued to “cross” him by posting honestly re SWRs and 200 Buy-and-Holders endorsed his post. That’s the night on which I realized that Buy-and-Hold is an investing strategy not fit for humans.
We will either move forward as a society following the next price crash or we will all go down together. I want nothing to do with Buy-and-Hold or any other Get Rich Quick strategy. I think the Buy-and-Holders had it right the first time, when they argued that we SHOULD use the peer-reviwed research as a guide.
I believe that we will all return to that core principle following the next crash. If we do, I think it would be fair to say that I will have no problem with the entire investing community taking me 100 percent seriously. If we do not, I will always have the small consolation of knowing that I fought as hard as anybody could fight to get all of my Buy-and-Hold friends on the right track before things collapsed.
There was a day when the “experts” did not take anyone who believed that people with black skin are equal to people with white skin seriously. I have zero desire to be associated with the sorts of tactics employed by the Goons of this world. No attack dogs. No fire hydrants. No death threats. No hate.
Call me madcap.
My best wishes to you and yours.
Rob
Anonymous says
A little edgier than usual.
Only a few goons are going to read it anyway.
Anonymous says
Desparately people make desparately comments.
Rob says
A little edgier than usual.
Not really.
The edgiest one was the one from the morning of May 13, 2002. If the Buy-and-Holders got the numbers that people use to plan their retirements wrong, the Buy-and-Holders got it ALL wrong. People listen to investing advice to plan their retirements. Getting those numbers wrong is a big deal. That’s why the Buy-and-Holders went nuclear when I posted honestly re that one.
The rest all just follows from that.
Yes, it sounds edgy to say that Jack is a fuck-up because he has known about the errors in the retirement studies for 13 years now and has not done anything about it. But the truly edgy thing is pointing out the error. At that point, there were only two ways that things could proceed: (1) Jack could demand immediate correction of the errors; or (2) Jack could f up. Jack chose Door Number Two. Hence this blog entry.
It sounds edgy to those who are in denial about the 13-year history of our discussions. But those who have followed things know that there HAD to be some massive f ups for things ever to have reached this point.
Only a few goons are going to read it anyway.
Perhaps that will be so today.
Perhaps it will not be so following the next price crash.
We’ll see, you know?
My best wishes to you and yours, Anonymous.
Rob
Rob says
Desparately people make desparately comments.
Right.
And there’s nothing desperate about Vanguard putting out a report that says that the reason why the authors of the Old School safe-withdrawal-rate studies got the numbers so wildly wrong is because they didn’t take into consideration the fact that unlucky return patterns could cause withdrawal rates that would work with the lucky return patterns to fail. When it was the Old School SWR studies that taught us this!
That makes perfect sense.
Truly outstanding!!!!!
Rob
Anonymous says
Rob,
Why do you think you are entitled to anything for VII let alone $500m. You didn’t come up with any of the ideas all you do is try and spread the word. The problem is you actually hurt VII and those ideas by the way you go about it.
ISIS is to Islam as Rob Bennett is to VII.
Anonymous says
Rob,
Most of the time I laugh at the things you write because how comical your claims appear to be. With your post today, I am just plain disgusted. It seems you will stoop to new lows with your comments without regard to truth or respect.
By the way, you can spare us from the profanities.
Anonymous says
“My good friend Jack Bogle is fucked up. He is one of those darn humans. How could he possibly NOT be fucked up? It goes with the territory. We are all fucked up to one degree or another re one matter or another. The shameful thing is that most of Jack’s friends don’t say anything when he acts in a fucked-up way. ”
A guy who pukes out thousands of words at a sitting, who claims he is a degreed lawyer, journalist, and personal finance professional, used 62 words, in which there the same vulgar obscenity appears four times. You not only lack credibility, you also lack morality.
Anonymous says
Oh, look! Rob’s learned a new “Big-boy” word.
:eyeroll:
Rob says
You didn’t come up with any of the ideas all you do is try and spread the word.
I half agree and half disagree.
Shiller showed that valuations affect long-term returns in 1981. All the rest of VII comes from Bogle. I didn’t personally come up with any of the core concepts. I just took all of Bogle’s great work and then corrected the one big mistake he made. So, yes, it is fair to say that my primary contribution has been to try to spread the word.
But I have also explored hundreds of implications of Shiller’s finding. Shiller is afraid to do that. He doesn’t even discuss the issue of asset allocation in his book. That is what most investors want to know about. Theory is important. But theory does not help people unless it is accompanied by the how-to stuff. So I have advanced Shiller’s work in many important ways.
And of course I have advanced Bogle’s work too. VII is really just a new form of Buy-and-Hold, an honest form of Buy-and-Hold, a Buy-and-Hold 2.0. Bogle’s work is 50 times more valuable when it works. Jack is entitled to praise for his many powerful insights. I think it would be fair to say that I am entitled to praise for making Jack’s insights workable in the real world. Moving from a stage where his many insights produce zero good fruit to a stage where his many insights produce mountains and mountains of good fruit is no small thing.
And the work that I have done in getting the word out has huge leverage. My aim has always been to open every board and blog on the internet to honest posting on the peer-reviewed research re safe withdrawal rates and scores of other critically important investment-related topics. Following the next crash, Wade Pfau will feel safe in posting his honest thoughts about how stock investing works. So will Shiller. So will Bogle. So will Bernstein. So will Mike Piper. So will Todd Tresidder. So will Carl Richards. And on and on and on and on.
That’s HUGE, Anonymous.
My personal brainpower is limited. But combine my brainpower with the brainpower of Shiller and Bogle and Pfau and Bernstein and Piper and Tresidder and Richards and THOUSANDS of others and you have really got something. The way to think about this is to consider how we have advanced in the use of computer technology from 1981 to today. We didn’t have cell phones back then. We didn’t have video games. We didn’t have Google. We didn’t have Twitter. We didn’t have tablets. We didn’t have tons of things. Had there been a Typewriter Mafia using Goon tactics to stop us from advancing in the computer technology area, we would still be stuck today where we were in 1981.
I believe that there will be people who love their country who will be speaking out against Mel Lindauer and John Greaney and Jack Bogle following the next crash. I don’t say that it is not going to be scary for them to do so. I say that their hearts are going to melt. I believe that they will look at the vast amount of human misery caused by the death threats and demands for unjustified board bannings and tens of thousands of acts of defamation and threats to get academic researchers fired from their jobs and they will want to help out the millions of middle-class investors whose lives have been destroyed by all this smelly Buy-and-Hold garbage.
Those people will be able to use the materials at this site to protect themselves from the attacks of you Goons when they work up the courage to show their love for their country by posting honestly on safe withdrawal rates and other issues. We have the law on our side. But to stand up to the Wall Street Con Men and to you Goons, we need to be able to SHOW how many criminal acts the Buy-and-Holders have committed as part of this massive act of financial fraud. This site DOCUMENTS what we all need to show to move on as a society to a far, far better place.
Do you see?
Yes, I am trying to spread the word about the 33 years of peer-reviewed research that will help us bring this economic crisis to an end and bring on the greatest period of economic growth ever seen in U.S. history. Have you noticed that no one else has managed to do that in 33 years? Shiller hasn’t done it. Bogle hasn’t done it. Pfau hasn’t done it. Burns hasn’t done it. Why? Because none of these people had the materials available at this site to help him make the case.
People know that there are hundreds of millions of dollars to be made reporting honestly on the last 33 years of peer-reviewed research. So there are HUGE incentives for posting honestly re all these matters.
People also know that the Buy-and-Hold Mafia has been engaging in ruthlessly abusive tactics to keep the truth about stock investing covered up for 33 years now. We need to get 10 brave people assembled in one place. Then it’s over. Once there is one large site on the internet telling the truth, it is going to get harder and harder by the day for the Buy-and-Holders to push their lies. We know from the reaction to my stuff that there are MILLIONS of middle-class people who would like to hear honest reports. All we need to do is to get a few prison sentences announced and that will go viral and Buy-and-Hold will be no more. It will be viewed as an obscene phrase at that point.
No?
I think that the work I am doing is important, Anonymous. It frees ALL of us. I wish that someone had done this work before I came along. Then I wouldn’t have had to go through what I have been put through for the past 13 years. I sure don’t want to see anyone else put through this. So I want to do the best job possible. And I will offer no apologies whatsoever when I am handed that check for $500 million. I earned every penny and a whole big bunch more.
I want us ALL to be free of this garbage, Anonymous. We are on the one-yard line, The shift from Buy-and-Hold to Valuation-Informed Indexing is the biggest advance in the history of personal finance. I think it would be fair to say that Bogle himself wishes that he had come clean back in 1981 instead of destroying millions of middle-class lives. If Bogle sees the importance of this, I have a hard time seeing how a Goon like yourself could entertain any serious doubts.
I mean, come f-ing on!
A joke!
Rob
Rob says
The problem is you actually hurt VII and those ideas by the way you go about it.
How so?
Do you not agree that announcement of your prison sentence will go viral?
Do I not talk about your criminal acts of financial fraud regularly?
Do you not agree that, once the announcement of your prison sentence goes viral, Buy-and-Hold will not be long for this world?
Could anything possibly be better news for each and every one of us?
Is there anything holding us back from telling every investor alive on Planet Earth about what the last 33 years of peer-reviewed research says other than the shame and anger and hate and ignorance and confusion and criminal acts of the Buy-and-Holders?
Are you saying that you have come to see a downside to the EXPOSURE of the Buy-and-Hold Lies?
If so, I’d sure like to hear more of what you have come up with. I am not even able to IMAGINE any possible downside. To me, bringing the economic crisis to an end and bringing on the greatest period of economic growth in U.S. history looks like a win/win/win/win/win.
Do you not see a benefit even in seeing your prison sentence shortened a bit?
Really?
Are you telling an f-ing joke?
Rob
Rob says
ISIS is to Islam as Rob Bennett is to VII.
Yeah, yeah.
Rob
Rob says
By the way, you can spare us from the profanities.
I am not a fan of the f-word. I use it rarely.
It’s appropriate language in this case.
If I had my leg blown off in a war, I would use the f-word.
There are millions of middle-class investors in the process of seeing their retirements fail as a consequence of the continued promotion of Buy-and-Hold strategies 33 years after the peer-reviewed research in this field showed that there is precisely zero chance that such a strategy could ever work for even a single long-term investor.
We have a big political problem. Anonymous. Following the next stock crash, we are going to need to restore the confidence of those millions of people in our economic and political systems. I think it would be fair to say that they are going to have a hard time understanding why none of the thousands of “experts” in this field ever used the f-word to refer to the 33-year cover-up.
I just did.
I believe that will help me gain some street cred in the eyes of the millions who will have seen their lives destroyed for no good reason whatsoever.
Fair enough?
Rob
Rob says
You not only lack credibility, you also lack morality.
I am prepared to stand before my Maker and explain why I thought it proper to make use of the f-word in this particular circumstance.
Perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps I will be told that there is never a circumstance in which use of that word can be justified.
Time will tell the tale, my old friend.
Hang in there.
Rob
Rob says
Oh, look! Rob’s learned a new “Big-boy” word.
Please feel free to spread the word all over the internet that I used the f-word to describe the biggest act of financial fraud in U.S. history, an act of financial fraud that extended for 33 years and caused the biggest economic crisis and that is in the process of causing millions of middle-class investors to suffer failed retirements.
I hope I will be strong enough to face up to the blowback I am likely to experience re that one.
Yowsa!
Rob
Anonymous says
Yet another example as to why you are banned from the mainstream financial boards. It is your BEHAVIOR.
Rob says
I oppose financial fraud, Anonymous.
I would like to shorten the prison sentences of my Buy-and-Hold friends to the extent possible.
What a meanie!
Rob
grandpop says
“If I had my leg blown off in a war, I would use the f-word. ”
So, when you are not starting civil rights movements, or fighting in ‘Nam, what do you do for fun, Mr. Audie Rosa Murphy Parks Ghandi?
Rob says
I play the Dominion card game.
When someone plays the Possession card (that means that they get to play your hand and take whatever you would have been able to buy with it for themselves), I have been known to mutter the f word under my breath.
Oops! I did it again!
Rob