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 it is our opinion that your posts are not honest, then we are okay with banning your posts, right? That is what you seem to do here. Why is it not okay for others to ban your posts?
Bernie Madoff is in prison today because he committed financial fraud. His crime was to send statements to the people who invested in his fund listing transactions that never took place.
Greaney similarly has made false claims about the safe withdrawal rate. He has said that it is the same number (4 percent) at all times. There is now 38 years of peer-reviewed research showing that valuations affect long-term returns. So the safe withdrawal rate is a number that varies, depending on the valuation level that applies on the day that the retirement begins. Do that math and you learn that, in January 2000, the safe withdrawal rate was 1.6 percent, not 4.0 percent. Greaney’s act of fraud has hurt hundreds of times the number of people who were hurt by Madoff’s act of fraud.
Is it “okay” to violate U.S. law? Is it “okay” to commit financial fraud? Is it “okay” to destroy millions of people’s lives (Greaney’s study was only used by thousands of people but Wade Pfau and I intended to get ALL of the Buy-and-Hold retirement studies corrected before you Goons threatened to send defamatory e-mails to his employer in an effort to get him fired from his job if he continued doing honest work in this field — so there are millions who will see their lives destroyed because of your acts of financial fraud in the event that stocks continue to perform in the future at least somewhat as they always have in the past).
I don’t think it is “okay” to commit financial fraud. So I am going to continue to report the safe withdrawal rate accurately and honestly and to do everything in my power to EXPOSE your massive act of financial fraud and thereby to bring it to a full and complete stop. You have not as of today been prosecuted for your act of financial fraud and so I suppose that in that very limited sense you could say that it has turned out “okay” for you. But Madoff was not in prison in the days before his acts of financial fraud were exposed either. I don’t think that he would say today that what he did was “okay.”
We will have to wait and see what your jury says about whether your acts of financial fraud are “okay” or not, Anonymous. That’s how our system works. I am going to continue to say that they are NOT okay. I presume that you are going to continue to say that they are okay. Your jury will decide the matter. I believe that our laws against financial fraud are good and important and necessary laws. I believe that we will see those laws enforced in the days following the next price crash. I SUPPORT those laws.
Does all of that help at least a tiny bit?
Law-and-Order-Guy Rob
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