“When the CAPE value Is Where It Is Today, You Shouldn’t Expect the Investing Field to Make Sense. We Are All Telling Each Other Lies About Stocks Because We Want to Keep That CAPE Value Up Where It Is. If We Were to Start Making Sense, That CAPE Value Would Tumble and Our Portfolio Values Would Be Cut in Half. There Are Trillions of Reasons Why As a People We Don’t Want That to Happen Just Yet.”

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

You keep taking about goons, but your board has been virtually dead for years. Same goes for the place you call goon central. Your explanation as to a lack of fans and followers does not make sense.

And what’s the name of Shiller’s book?

Irrational Exuberance.

Do you see?

When the CAPE value is where it is today, you shouldn’t expect the investing field to make sense. We are all telling each other lies about stocks because we want to keep that CAPE value up where it is. If we were to start making sense, that CAPE value would tumble and our portfolio values would be cut in half. There are trillions of reasons why as a people we don’t want that to happen just yet.

The long-term reality remains that we would all live better lives if we permitted ourselves to talk about the far-reaching implications of the last 39 years of peer-reviewed research in this field. I think we are going to see the merit of making that big advance once the CAPE value has fallen and the horrors of the pure Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold approach have revealed themselves once again.

We’ll see.

I hope that you Goons will be willing to say a prayer for me when we are all living through it. I certainly will be including my Goon friends in my prayers at that time.

Hang in there, man.

Pious Rob