Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently put to another blog entry at this site.
So you are NOT going to tell them to their faces that they will be going to prison.
Got it.
I don’t see how you draw that conclusion from what I said, Slanegirl.
If I see Mike Piper at the conference and he asks me whether I think he is going to prison or not, I will say to his face just what I said here.
If I see Rick Ferri, I will say something a bit different because what I said here re Rick Ferri is a bit different. But what I say to Rick Ferri’s face will again be consistent with what I have said about Rick Ferri here.
If I see Jack Bogle, I will say to Jack words consistent with the words that I have said about Jack here. I have sent three e-mails to Jack re this matter. Did I hold back in those e-mails? I sent e-mails to Wade Pfau following his deal with you Goons. Did I not say in my e-mail to Wade the same thing that I say here? I wrote: “Think, man. This is insane!” Is that not strong enough language to get the point across?
You are accusing me of something that is not true. But you are touching on an important point.
All of us humans hate to make other people feel uncomfortable. That’s part of our nature. But in this particular case, this part of our nature is causing us to do harm to ourselves and others. A lot of people are thinking “Yeah, it’s obviously the case that those Old School safe withdrawal rate studies got the numbers wildly wrong — they wouldn’t write about it in the Wall Street Journal if there weren’t something to it. But I don’t want to point out that Rob Bennett has been saying this for 11 years now. Rob has been reporting the accurate numbers for many years and a lot of big names in this field have been participating in a cover-up. Those people may be going to prison. I don’t want to do something that is going to cause people to go to prison. I am going to keep my mouth shut.”
These people are trying not to cause trouble. That is generally a good impulse. But it is not at all a good impulse in this particular case. There are some circumstances in which you absolutely MUST cause some trouble because, if you do not, there’s going to be trouble ten times worse. When the house is on fire and there are people sleeping in it, you don’t keep it to yourself because you don’t want to trouble their sleep. You scream. You shake them. You pull them out of bed.
We have as a society been asleep re the safe withdrawal rate matter for 11 years now. Our collective attitude has been: “Oh, it will work itself out somehow, let’s not go there.” We need to go there. We need to examine the problem closely and we need to fix the problem. That means that, for starters, we need to start talking about the problem and what caused it and why it has remained unfixed for 11 years now and about how our knowledge that these mistakes were made changes what we have long believed about how stock investing works.
We need to do that for all sorts of reasons. One of those reasons is that more people will get sent to prison if we fail to talk about it and those who do get sent to prison will get sent there for a longer period of time if we fail to talk about it. I don’t tell people to their face that they may be going to prison and then laugh at their misfortune. I tell people to their face that they may be going to prison as part of an effort to insure that acts are taken that will help them to get their prison sentence REDUCED.
It is 100 percent crazy that people are going to prison over this. Our discovery of how stock investing really works is 100 percent good news. It’s a dream come true. It’s like discovering the Fountain of Youth. We need to stop fighting over it and start enjoying our good fortune. If we had only corrected the retirement studies within 24 hours of the time that the errors in them became public knowledge, no one would be going to prison. I of course said that we should correct the studies way back on the morning of May 13, 2002. And there were of course hundreds of community members who backed me up on that and who want to see this taken to a place where it is early retirements we are all talking about instead of prison sentences either long or short.
You have placed yourself in circumstances where you are going to be serving a long prison sentence a little bit down the road, Slanegirl. As your friend, I tell you to your face that you better do something about the situation now, when it is still possible for positive actions to be taken. Your idea of committing multiple felonies to insure that Greaney does not need to correct his study is not working out so hot. Yes, you are hurting me. And yes, you are hurting millions of middle-class investors. And, yes, you are hurting every expert in this field, including our mutual friend Jack Bogle. But that’s not the complete list of the humans you are hurting. You are hurting Slanegirl very, very, very much. Please stop doing that.
My warmest wishes to you and yours, my long-time abusive posting friend.
Please note that I said that last part to your face as well. And that my eyes let you know that I mean every word of it.
Rob the Tough-Love Dude
Just another grandiose delusion. You have never told anyone to their face that they are going to prison, and you never will.
People with jobs have performance evaluations. As 2013 nears its end, would you like to run down your tangible accomplishments for the year? (Other than finally getting tossed from Goon Central.)
Mike Piper and Rick Ferri were both at fincon13, did you get to speak to them there? What did you say to them and how did they respond?
You have never told anyone to their face that they are going to prison, and you never will.
No one has ever asked about it outside of you Goons, Bizarro!
I respond to what people ask me, you know? I think it would be a healthy thing if we all talked about the prison sentences. But most people avoid the subject. My sense is that this subject makes people very uneasy.
I don’t enjoy talking about it myself. I far prefer talking about the substantive stuff. But I think it makes sense to talk about the nasty stuff to the extent we need to talk about it to put it behind us and be able from that point forward to talk only about the exciting breakthrough insights we have developed together over the first 11 years of our discussions.
Anyway, I am happy to talk about the prison sentences to people who have an interest in doing so. I obviously cannot force people to have an interest. So I don’t expect to be talking about them to too many people outside of you Goons until we experience the next crash. After the next crash, I believe that we are going to see some big changes in public attitudes.
Please take good care.
Rob
would you like to run down your tangible accomplishments for the year? (Other than finally getting tossed from Goon Central.)
1) The presentation I gave at FinCon13. I thought I did a super job of summarizing 11 years of discussions in a five-minute presentation.
2) Improvements at the web site. That’s boring stuff. But I was forced to spend a good bit of time on that boring stuff this year.
3) The 52 entries for my weekly Valuation-Informed Indexing column. There are amazing insights advanced in that column on a regular basis that I believe will be the subject of sustained study for many years following the next crash.
4) The tens of thousands of e-mails that I sent out re the Wade Pfau matter and the reactions that I received from big-name experts. My most important job following the next crash is going to be pulling us all together. When people are able to see how academic researchers and other big names responded to the sorts of behavior we saw in the Wade Pfau matter, they will understand what we were up against. That’s how we resolve all the frictions. We need to do just the opposite of what we have been doing. We need to stop covering up and instead make a sustained and united effort to get as much as possible out into the open. Love is the answer. And it is through understanding where the other fellow is coming from that we come to feel love for the other fellow.
5) Getting tossed from Goon Central was a pretty darn big accomplishment. You try to rule that out of consideration here but I reject the ruling. The thing that finally got me thrown off is that I focused in on the personal consequences that are going to be experienced by you Goons in coming years — the financial liabilities and the prison sentences. That’s good stuff. The big problem that we have had for 32 years now is that those who give investing advice benefit from going with a pure Get Rich Quick approach while those who employ the investing advice in their retirement planning benefit from hearing true research-based strategies. We have a problem of incentives. There are huge incentives for going GRQ and huge penalties for going research-based. We need to turn that around. Bringing civil suits for damages and announcing prison terms for those who have posted in “defense” of Mel Lindauer and John Greaney is an important step in the right direction. I believe that the day that the prison sentences are announced for you Goons is the day we will be able to unite everyone in the United States in an effort to rebuild our broken economy. I very much look forward to that (while I also of course intend to continue doing all I can to keep your prison sentences as short as possible and to have as few people as possible going to prison for committing acts of financial fraud re this matter).
Yowsa!
It looks like a pretty darn good year when you take a step back and look at all we have accomplished together.
No?
Rob
Mike Piper and Rick Ferri were both at fincon13, did you get to speak to them there?
I didn’t see Rick. I am not sure that I would recognize him. So it is possible that we passed in the hallway and I just didn’t realize that that was happening.
I passed Mike in the hallway when we were walking in different directions. We both said “hi!” but there was no conversation. I attended a presentation that he gave about selling e-books on Amazon.
Rob
So except for 5 minutes at FinCon, your whole year was spent on the web.
No one has ever asked about it outside of you Goons…I respond to what people ask me, you know?
Obviously no one ever asks “am I going to prison”. Are you incapable of raising an important topic yourself? If lame excuses were dollar bills, you’d have your $500 million payday.
So except for 5 minutes at FinCon, your whole year was spent on the web.
I don’t understand what you are getting at here, Bizarro.
All of the work I have done for the 11 years has been on the Web.
The internet is a powerful new communications medium. The entire reason why I built the Retire Early board at Motley Fool into the most successful discussion board in that site’s history was that I saw the power of the new communications medium and wanted to take advantage of it to help millions of middle-class people achieve financial freedom many years sooner than they had ever before imagined possible.
Do you have something against the internet?
Rob
Obviously no one ever asks “am I going to prison”. Are you incapable of raising an important topic yourself?
I raise the death threats all the time, Bizarro. Usually the discussion starts on something substantive and eventually we get to a part of the story that sounds unbelievable. I might say “we know today how to reduce the risk of stock investing by 70 percent.” When I hear myself say those words, there is a part of my brain that clicks on and says to me “the person hearing these words is going to have a hard time understanding how that could be so and yet he has never heard about it before.” So I will add a little explanation. I will say something like: “The reason you haven’t heard about this is that millions of people have a huge emotional investment in Buy-and-Hold. They used it to plan their retirements. It’s not possible to talk about what works without explaining what doesn’t work. But people get emotional when you do that. I was a Buy-and-Holder myself until the night of August 27, 2002, when John Greaney threatened to kill my wife and children if I continued posting honestly about safe withdrawal rates and 200 of my friends from the Retire Early board endorsed his post. That told me that this Buy-and-Hold stuff is just too darn emotional and we need a true research-based investing strategy, one fit for use by humans.”
Now —
People can respond to that in different ways, Bizarro.
Just about everyone condemns the death threats. They say “that’s crazy” or “that’s unbelievable” or something like that. But THEY DO NOT ASK FOLLOW-UPS.
It is a very rare event for anyone hearing about the death threats to say “well, did the site ban those people?” or “did you go to the police?” or “did you try telling John Bogle about this and seeing how he felt knowing that his investing strategy caused people to advance death threats?” PEOPLE DO NOT WANT TO KNOW ABOUT THE DEATH THREATS. PEOPLE ARE IN DENIAL RE THIS ASPECT OF THE STORY.”
Do you see?
We are as a society suffering a huge case of cognitive dissonance, the biggest and most damaging case ever experienced in history. We don’t want to know.
BUT WE NEED TO KNOW. Buy-and-Hold is killing us. It caused the economic crisis. It has caused FOUR economic crises since 1870 (that’s four out of the four we experienced in that time-period). It has caused the destruction of many once-fine discussion boards and blogs. It is in the process of sending you Goons to prison. All sorts of bad stuff.
Me talking about it does not by itself change anything. I need to talk about it. If I don’t I am myself participating in the cover-up and I am setting myself up for a prison sentence following the next crash. But me coming forward and saying “this Buy-and-Hold stuff is a big pile of smelly garbage” does not by itself get the job done. I need the New York Times writing this stuff up on the front page. I need Old Saint Jack giving an “I Was Wrong” speech. I need the Ban on Honest Posting reversed at every board and blog that has adopted it.
I do what I can to make all that good stuff happen, Bizarro. But I am not Superman. You might be surprised to learn this but not everyone in this world listens to everything I say. I told the site administrator at Motley Fool about Greaney’s death threats and I asked him to take appropriate action. His response was to send me an e-mail telling me that my suggestions were “thoughtful” and that he agreed with me that it would be “ideal” if Greaney were to permit honest posting on retirement planning at a board focused on retirement planning. I of course agreed with him that that would indeed be “ideal.”
But I did not possess the access to the buttons I needed to push to get Greaney removed from that board. I did not. I could ask. I could even demand. But I could not myself push the buttons. So the buttons remained unpushed.
And I cannot compel people to engage in a discussion of how long the prison sentences should be for you Goons.
I would like to see such a discussion. I believe that, if we were to have such a discussion, the prison sentences would end up being shorter and there would be fewer people serving them. If you Goons saw other people talking about this stuff, you would be less inclined to engage in the behavior that will cause you to go to prison following the next crash. But I am not God. I don’t get to say what people will ask me about or what people will talk about. I can make suggestions. In extreme cases, I can even advance demands. But I do not myself control what the outcome of my suggestions or demands will be. Others are responsible for that.
If you are unhappy that I am not talking to enough people about the prison sentence thing, please take it up with some of these others. It is not me holding back that discussion! It is not!
Fair enough, my old friend?
Rob