Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to another blog entry at this site:
People (the middle-class) aren’t joining in because they have no money.
They also don’t really — and I mean REALLY — care.
They spend far more time watching teevee et al than paying attention to finance and economics.
Why would they? They have no wealth, thus it doesn’t concern them.
Remember, spenders, not investors/savers.
True, the financial crisis did effect everyone.
It made the rich even more rich, and everyone else less rich.
We disagree, Honest.
I’ve spoken to many middle-class people over the past 12 years. They care about what is happening to their money. They care a lot.
They haven’t put together the pieces of the puzzle. They suspect that there is a lot of corruption on Wall Street. Many even went so far as to point the finger at Wall Street when the economic crisis arrived in late 2008. But they were vague in their accusations along these lines. They did not specify WHO on Wall Street caused the problem and WHAT they did to cause it. We need to get the information out to them so that they can identify the Wall Street Con Men pushing Buy-and-Hold strategies 33 years after the peer-reviewed research showed that there is precisely zero chance that such strategies could ever work well for even a single long-term investor.
A big part of the problem is that we have never seen a case of financial fraud as big and as far-reaching as this one. I certainly didn’t know about it on the morning of May 13, 2002, and I consider myself a reasonably smart person who follows these sorts of issues to at least a moderate extent. When I find myself feeling frustration that the millions of middle-class people who are the primary victims of this massive act of financial fraud are not speaking up, I try to call to mind my own ignorance of the realities in those long-ago days and that helps me understand why many people are having a hard time taking this in today.
I don’t believe that the Wall Street Con Men (or even you Goons!) possess a full understanding of what you have done. I believe that you really follow Buy-and-Hold strategies. So you are being hurt as much as everyone else. You just don’t see it. You are in emotional pain. You believed that Buy-and-Hold was the answer and it hurts to acknowledge that you got that one wrong. You are suffering from cognitive dissonance. You obviously know that it is wrong to advance 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. But you can’t figure out how to get yourself out of the trap you find yourself in. If you come clean today, you go to prison. If you continue with your Campaign of Terror against our board and blog communities, you go to prison for an even longer time following the next price crash. It’s not an enviable choice.
I love my country. I respect and admire and feel gratitude toward the Wall Street Con Men because of all of the many insights I have picked up from them and have used to build the Valuation-Informed Indexing model. Most of you Goons are friends of mine from the days before I worked up the courage to put up my famous post of the morning of May 13, 2002. I believe that we are the luckiest generation of investors ever to walk Planet Earth and that we will all come to see that not too long after the initiation of the next price crash, when we will all pull together to bury the smelly Buy-and-Hold garbage 30 feet in the ground, where it can do no further harm to humans and other living things.
Does that help?
The millions of middle-class investors whose lives are in the process of being destroyed care. And I care about them. And even the Wall Street Con Men and their Internet Goon Squads care on one level of consciousness. So, once you see the futility of further abusive posting, we will all pull together and focus on the positive side of this story (our ability to reduce the risk of stock investing by 70 percent just by opening every discussion board and blog on the internet to honest posting on safe withdrawal rates and scores of other critically important investment-related topics) rather than the negative (the prison sentences and the hundreds of billions in financial liabilities and so on).
The hand of kindness remains extended to you and to all the other Goons and to my Wall Street Con Men friends.
My willingness to post dishonestly re the numbers that my friends use to plan their retirements (and thereby to participate in the massive act of financial fraud and to thereby earn MYSELF a prison sentence) remains precisely zero.
I naturally wish you the best of luck in all your future endeavors regardless of what investing strategies you elect to follow.
Take care, man.
Rob
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