Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently put to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:
“It sure won’t be me sending him to prison. I have zero power to do any such thing and zero desire to ever acquire such power.
I will tell the story honestly. I am required to say that Bogle was made aware of the Lindauer Matter by numerous posters at the Bogleheads Forum and did nothing about it. That’s a stone cold fact and that is what I am going to say. Financial fraud is a crime in the United States. That’s a stone cold fact too. The act of fraud does not cancel out the many good things he has done. But it is in the process of doing very serious harm to millions of people. So it is something that everyone in the nation needs to know about and come to terms with.”
You are the only one talking about fraud and prison, so you would have to be the one driving it for it to happen.
No.
I’ve spoken about the possibility on several occasions. But all of my energies for 16 years running now have been directed to avoiding the possibility that Bogle or anyone else will ever go to prison because of the mistakes that were made in the design of the Buy-and-Hold strategy. I find the prospect of Bogle or anyone else going to prison HORRIFYING.
If you see a friend of yours driving drunk and you become worried that he is going to go through a red light and kill someone and end up in prison for reckless manslaughter, would it be fair to say that, if you take him aside and warn him of that possibility, that shows that you are pushing for him to be put in prison? I sure don’t see how. It seems to me that the reality is just the opposite. You are doing all that is in your power to keep your friend OUT of prison. You are being a true friend.
I sent an e-mail to Motley Fool in June 2002 asking that John Greaney be removed from the Retire Early board for his insanely abusive posting practices, which were causing all of our best posters to leave the site. The response of Motley Fool’s site administrator was to thank me for my “thoughtful” e-mail and to pass along the observation that it would be “ideal” if Greaney were to permit honest posting re retirement planning at that retirement planning board. Motley Fool liked the money that Greaney brought in with his relentless promotion of his Get Rich Quick retirement study.
It’s Motley Fool that started Greaney down the road where he is now looking forward to a long prison sentence in the days following the next price crash. Had Greaney been banned, I would have put up a post six months later asking that our old friend be permitted to post again, everyone in the community would have endorsed it, and Motley Fool would have granted the request. By playing it the way that he played it, the site administrator made it almost inevitable that Greaney would be going to prison somewhere down the line. He couldn’t deny that he knew about the errors in the study at that point. So things just got worse and worse and worse for him. In time he found himself threatening to send defamatory e-mails to Wade Pfau’s employer in an effort to get him fired from his job.
Greaney is responsible for his own behavior. I am not saying that anyone else is responsible for him going to prison. But it is a reality that we live in communities and that we all have responsibilities to others who live in those communities with us. Greaney made a mistake. That sort of thing happens. Greaney gave in to a temptation to cover up the mistake rather than acknowledge it. That sort of thing happens too. The proper thing to do when something like that happens is to EXPOSE the cover-up so that it is brought to a full and complete stop before it can do more harm. Fail to expose a cover-up and it grows and grows and grows and the person at the center of the cover-up can never be free again because he now needs not only to cover up the original mistake but also the cover-up and the cover-up of the cover-up of the cover-up of the cover-up.
I acted like John Greaney’s friend when I asked that he be banned. That was the proper response to his insanely abusive posting. You hurt him in a very serious way by aiding his cover-up, Anonymous. You were no friend to him at all.
And of course the same basic realities apply with Bogle as well, just on a much bigger stage. In an ideal world, Bogle would have in 1981 made the changes in Buy-and-Hold required by Shiller’s publication of his “revolutionary” (Shiller’s word) research findings. If cognitive dissonance blocked him from doing that (which I believe is the case), then his friends would have insisted that he at a bare minimum acknowledge that there were now two schools of academic thought re how stock investing works and that no more would he act as if there were only one. That would have been enough to keep Bogle on the right side of the law. And that would have been enough for all of us to have learned amazing things over the past 37 years about how stock investing works and to be living far richer (in every sense of the word) lives today.
It didn’t happen. So now we have this huge mess to clean up. A mess that appears likely to get my friend John Greaney tossed in a prison cell in days to come. And a mess that may even possibly get my friend Jack Bogle thown in a prison cell in days to come. My voice has been the strongest and the firmest and the loudest and the clearest speaking in OPPOSITION to continuation of the massive cover-up of the errors in the Buy-and-Hold retirement studies for 16 years running now, Anonymous. There is no one else even in a close second place.
Are you joking?
I am the one who has been doing everything in his power for a long, long time now either to see that there are no prison sentences or that, if it is too late for that, that the prison sentences that we will be seeing in days to come will be as short as they can possibly be given the circumstances that prevail today. Please given me a freakin’ break.
My best and warmest wishes to you and yours, dear Goon friend.
Prison-Sentence Opponent Rob
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