Set forth below is the text of a post that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:
“There was one occasion when John Walter Russell and I were working on a calculator and John sent him an e-mail asking about him about how he developed his data-set. Shiller responded to that. There was at least one other occasion (I think there might have been two) in which I sent an e-mail to Shiller letting him know about the problems that I have experienced with you Goons. He did not respond to those.”
Doesn’t that speak volumes? When someone sends a rational email, they get a response. When someone sends an email that is not rational, they are ignored.
We need to address the financial fraud stuff and the intimidation stuff. We cannot move forward until we do that. For so long as the financial fraud stuff and the intimidation stuff continue to work, the Buy-and-Holders are going to continue to turn to that sort of thing.
Shiller doesn’t feel comfortable calling out the Buy-and-Holders (a lot of whom he greatly respects and has friendships with) re the financial fraud stuff and the intimidation stuff. I get it. I didn’t feel comfortable doing that myself for a long time. I didn’t start talking about prison sentences for you Goons until your acts of extortion against Wade Pfau. Those didn’t take place until nine years after I ventured forward with my famous post of the morning of May 13, 2002. So I get it loud and clear.
But the reality remains that we cannot move forward as a society until all the stuff that has happened is out in the open. People need to understand why there has been a 38-year delay in the launching of the national debate re Shiller’s “revolutionary” (his word) research findings. That couldn’t have happened without lots of criminal stuff going down. I mean, come on
And the longer that we go without talking about the criminal stuff, the more of it we see. I am 100 percent certain that John Greaney didn’t post his retirement study at his site with the thought that someday his “defense” of it would be leading to a prison term for him and his friends. He saw that lots of others were talking about the 4 percent rule and figured that he would get in on the game. He based his study on the Trinity study. That was peer-reviewed research. In ordinary circumstances, basing a study on an earlier study that was published in a peer-reviewed journal would be a pretty darn safe thing to do. Greany got caught up in something a lot bigger than he realized.
Are we being kind to Greaney by failing to point out the error in his study? That’s the question that people like Shiller need to be asking themselves. I see nothing kind about it. It is cruel to pretend that we see a valuation adjustment in that study and to fail to speak up about the criminal acts because failing to speak up just means that Greaney’s error ends up hurting more people and his prison sentence ends up being longer than it would have been had people spoken up at the appropriate time. If Motley Fool had given Greaney the boot in June of 2002, as I suggested, Greaney wouldn’t be going to prison at all. He would have been banned for a few months and then I would have put up a post recommending that he be permitted to return and everyone would have agreed and that would have been the end of it. A better result? I sure think so.
Talking about the financial fraud and the intimidation tactics is an ugly business. There’s no question about it. It’s a very unpleasant business. But the reality is that we didn’t always know how stock investing works and some of us got on the wrong track for a long time as a result and now we need to sort things out so that we all live better lives in the future. There have been criminal acts and they don’t go away by us pretending that they did not take place. So we need as a society to acknowledge them and to work out what to do about them.
Is there a place for charity in our deliberations? I sure think so. But there is nothing even a tiny bit charitable in going along with further delays. That’s the cruelest possible way to proceed. We need to get all of this stuff out in the open, be as charitable as we can possibly be when doing it, and then move forward into a brighter future. Shiller has a role to play in helping us all to do that and so do thousands of others who until now have been reluctant to speak out or who have been wiling to speak out only in a tentative way.
That’s my sincere take, Anonymous. I naturally wish you all the best that this life has to offer a person.
Rob
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