Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:
I don’t see fraud. I don’t see death threats. I don’t see job threats. I don’t see anyone that is afraid (maybe you are afraid?). Until people see actual evidence of what you say, your words are “catastrophically unproductive” as someone once said.
I pointed out that the retirement study posted at John Greaney’s web site lacks an adjustment for the valuation level that applies on the day the retirement begins in a post that I put to a Motley Fool discussion board on the morning of May 13,2002. Today’s date is January 29, 2020. The study has not been corrected to this day.
Please mark me down as saying that that constitutes fraud, the biggest case of financial fraud in the history of the United States by a long shot.
I will continue doing everything in my power to EXPOSE this massive act of financial fraud. I can do no more and I can do no less.
If pointing out financial fraud and seeking to have it corrected constitutes catastrophically unproductive behavior, then please make me down as pleading 100 percent “guilty as charged.” And please feel free to tell everyone on the internet that that is my plea.
I naturally wish you the best of luck in all your future life endeavors.
Catastrophically Unproductive Rob
Anonymous says
Rob says:
“I pointed out that the retirement study posted at John Greaney’s web site lacks an adjustment for the valuation level that applies on the day the retirement begins in a post that I put to a Motley Fool discussion board on the morning of May 13,2002. Today’s date is January 29, 2020. The study has not been corrected to this day.”
Wade answers back to Rob by saying:
“And the further reality is that if I *did* lack personal integrity, I could have made this all stop just by saying the meaningless sentence you want so desperately to hear: “I think the errors in the traditional safe withdrawal rate studies must be corrected by using Rob’s analytically valid method.”
But I don’t believe that. I do not believe you have offered a valid correction to the safe withdrawal rate question. And I believe that retirement income strategies go much further than the question of a safe withdrawal rate. And so that is why I’ve had to endure your ongoing harassment for months on end now.”
I think people are much more likely to believe Wade Pfau than Rob Bennett.
Rob says
Not if they hear both sides.
Before he was threatened, Wade said that he believed that Greaney’s retirement study was “dangerous.” He wrote to the authors of the Trinity study (a peer-reviewed study on which the Greaney study was based) asking that the study be corrected. He expressed the belief that the peer-reviewed research that he co-authored with me showing that long-term timing always works might be worthy of a Nobel prize. He criticized the “hostile atmosphere” toward honest posting on Shiller’s research that he saw at the Bogleheads Forum.
If people hear both sides, they will believe Rob Bennett and the version of Wade Pfau that he felt safe revealing until his career was threatened by you Goons and people like John Bogle and William Bernstein and Larry Swedroe failed to jump to his defense. The people of the United States have laws protecting us from the sorts of behavior that we have seen from those posting in “defense” of Mel Linduaer and John Greaney. Now we just need to insist that those laws be enforced in a reasonable manner. I believe that we will see more people speaking up in the days following the next price crash.
If you were not worried about what people would believe if they heard both sides, you never would have threatened Wade or me (or any of the others) in the first place.
It will be interesting to see how it all plays out.
My best and warmest wishes to you and yours.
Believable Rob