“Most People Look at the Numbers on Their Portfolio Statement to See How Their Investment Strategy Is Doing. So Most People Are Not Inclined to Demand That Criminal Charges Be Brought Today.”

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:

If laws were broken, then file charges. Otherwise, you are just repeating lies.

It is all the people of the United States who use the internet to learn how stock investing works. So the crime is against all the people of the United States. So we all need to pull together to demand that charges by filed by the prosecutors who work for us.

That will happen. Did the people who were defrauded by Bernie Madoff insist that charges be filed before the fraud was exposed? They did not. Madoff’s investors referred to him as “Saint Bernie” in the days before they lost their retirement money. The fraud had been going on for a long time. But it was only when they saw their retirement funds disappear that charges were brought. It appears to me that it is going to go the same way with The Great Buy-and-Hold Con.

All who follow the peer-reviewed research have known since 1981 that valuations affect long-term returns. So in an intellectual sense the fraud was exposed in 1981 (except it wasn’t really fraud until it was exposed — until Shiller published his “revolutionary” research findings, Buy-and-Hold was a mistake, not a con). But people have not suffered devastating losses to this day. We have seen poor returns for 18 years running now as a consequence of the out-of-control bull of the late 1990s. But the full reality is that those following Buy-and-Hold strategies have not done poorly if you count what happened in the years before 2000 and even from 2000 forward the losses have not been devastating. That’s what most people look at, most people look at the numbers on their portfolio statement to see how their investment strategy is doing. So most people are not inclined to demand that criminal charges be brought today. That would probably change if honest posting were permitted and people could see what has been done to them and how the Buy-and-Holders have behaved to keep the cover-up going. But I think it would be fair to sat that you Goons have zero intention of permitting honest posting. So we are where we are.

The fraud is ongoing. If the market continues in the future to perform anything at all as it has always performed in the past, we will see the devastating losses in the next year or two or three. Is there some reason why we would not demand charges to be brought at that time? That’s sure what I expect to see happen. All of us who love our country should of course be doing what we can to have this massive act of financial fraud exposed as soon as possible. But there is only so much that humans can do. You Goons are pretty darn brutal in your abusiveness. I think it would be fair to say that no one who lives in the United States has seen an act of financial fraud this extensive. So it may be that we are going to need to wait a bit re the bringing of criminal charges. We can let people know that they are coming so that they can avoid putting posts up in “defense” of the Lindauerheads and the Greaney Goons so that the number who go to prison will be as small as possible given the circumstances that apply today. And we can do what we can to urge you Goons to come clean prior to the crash so that your own prison sentences might be shortened a bit. And then we need to let it go and accept what comes. No?

The bottom line is that the good news here is 50 times more good than the bad news here is bad. The last 37 years of peer-reviewed research is amazing, life-enhancing stuff. The fact that we are going to see a good number of our Goon friends sent to prison is a drag, to be sure. But the negative here hardly compares to the good we will see done for millions when we are able to tell people how to invest in ways that permit them to retire many years sooner while taking on only a fraction of the risk that they had to take on in the Buy-and-Hold Era. We have to take the bad with the good. We should do all that we can to keep the bad as limited as we can possibly make it. But we should not lose site of the full reality that the good news here is 50 times more good than the bad news here is bad.

Does that help at all?

Rob