Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to another blog entry at this site:
“My family should not be suffering at all.”
Given the size of your house and the vacations you’ve lamented you’ve had to skip, I’d say they most certainly are. No one escapes unscathed when Dad’s “job” is trolling the internet.
Meanwhile I’ve maintained a mostly stock buy and hold portfolio, remained gainfully employed, and given my family – and myself – the life we deserve.
And yet you are the one going to prison and not me, Anonymous.
There’s something messed up here.
The mess-up is that giving investment advice is not ONLY about turning a quick buck.
Honesty matters.
That’s why we have laws against financial fraud.
Those laws were adopted by the entire nation. Those laws are my protection. I have zero desire to give up the protection of those laws by putting up some words endorsing your massive act of financial fraud. Zero.
So we are just going to have to wait and see whether the price crash changes things. I believe that, when people lose most of their retirement money, they are going to be angry at those who tricked them out of their life savings. That’s what happened to Bernie Madoff (“Saint Bernie” in the days before his con was exposed) and I believe that that’s what will happen to Jack Bogle and those who have posted in “defense” of him.
You pretend to believe otherwise. I am not convinced by the act. If you really believed otherwise, you would drop it and get on with your life. But even if you really did believe otherwise, we still end up in the same place. There are no words that I can put forward that will convince you that Shiller is right and there are no words that you can put forward that will convince me that Fama is right. Fama got there first and so Buy-and-Hold is dominant for now and some crooked people have elected to use that dominance in ways not permitted by U.S. law to shut me out.
So be it. I don’t like it. It happened regardless of my feelings. I accept it.
Is there something you want from me?
I say that this matter is going to be decided following the next price crash. That’s when lots of people will work up the courage to join me in standing up to you Goons and prison sentences will be announced for you and then all the rest of us will live happily ever after.
Is that okay by you?
Is there something you want me to do (something that I CAN do — I don’t do financial fraud) to make it okay by you?
I have offered to spin things to put you in the best possible light. I’ve done it before, I think it’s the right thing to do in these circumstances, and I fully intend to continue to do it in the future. I ask nothing from you for that favor from me. But that’s as far as I go. I don’t cross the felony line. I don’t CONSIDER crossing the felony line. I work hard to get thousands and thousands of posts in the record showing that it has always been my uncompromising policy not to cross the felony line. I don’t think you are dumb, but even if I did think you were dumb, I couldn’t possibly think you were so dumb that you wouldn’t get this by now. So I have to believe you get it.
So what are you trying to accomplish with your posts here?
Do you ever ask yourself that question?
I get more posts in the record in which I speak out in strong OPPOSITION to the 35-year cover up. What do YOU get?
You get nothing. Feel free to continue. Most of your efforts will get deleted. But some will get through. Include a little joke and I will approve the post. Include a question that appears to me to possess a tiny bit of sincerity and I will approve the post. Approach something from an angle that hasn’t been explored 20 times before and I will approve the post.
But we both know my words are not going to change anything. I think it would be fair to say that that was clear to every single person involved at least 13 years ago, perhaps something close to a full 14 years ago.
I cannot post dishonestly re the numbers that my friends use to plan their retirements. I care about my plan. I want it to work. And that makes me feel for the people being tricked. And that makes it impossible for me to lie about this stuff. I am clearly an outlier. Most people are able to rationalize a million lies. I am not. I’m proud of this trait of mine, lots of others think I am a moron. So be it. I think what I think and other people think what they think. I believe that someday I will stand before my Creator and I want to be able to say that I did not lie to my friends about the numbers that they use to plan their retirements. So I will continue to do what I feel I need to do.
And you will continue to do what you feel you need to do coming at things from a very different perspective. Good luck with it, you know. I can’t say that I understand what you think you might accomplish by continuing to post here. It’s my job to figure these sorts of things out. That one remains a bit of a mystery to me. My best guess is that you are not at ease with your position and so you feel compelled to do something and yet you do not want to go to prison AT ALL and so you cannot bear to come clean and so you follow this crazy middle position of saying the same thing over and over again to no apparent purpose.
Whatever, I guess.
I hate that word “whatever.” I like to know why things happen. I don’t like to give up trying to figure things out. But after 14 years I believe that I may have to acknowledge that this one is beyond my reach. Feel free to do what you like. I don’t really get it. I get it halfway but not fully. If you truly have decided to roll the dice (I believe that you have), then it seems to me that you should just let it play out and not spend any more words on any more nonsense.
But it’s your call. I like jokes. So come up with even a little joke and you get past the line. And I obviously want to respond to any even partly sincere questions. That’s my job and, Goon or no Goon, I can learn from someone putting forward a partly or fully sincere question. So those go up.
The rest I will just have to accept.
Just don’t get any funny ideas in your head that you might someday say something that would cause me to consider crossing the felony line. Not this boy. Not gonna happen. No way, no how.
And please do take care. These warm ending lines of mine are sincere. You may not see it that way but they are sincere and its important to me that I make the effort to reach out and help someone whom I consider a friend even if he is a long-confirmed Goon. This is investing stuff, it should never have gotten personal on either side. The fact that the Buy-and-Holders take any mention of the last 35 years of peer-reviewed research in this field so personally is one of many things that tells me that this “strategy” is a big pile of smelly garbage.
That remains the dominant model for the time being.
But not for too much longer.
Or at least so Rob Bennett says.
The End.
Rob
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