” We Need to Insist on Reasonable Enforcement of Those Laws If We Want to Advance in Our Understanding of How Stock Investing Works.”

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

No expert has ever agreed with you about Greaney. No expert is currently willing to even speak with you.

A good number have agreed with me. Bill Bernstein said in his book that the safe withdrawal rate is not always 4 percent, that the Buy-and-Hold studies were off by a full two percentage points at the top of the bubble. Wade Pfau said that the Greaney study is “dangerous.” John Bogle did not comment specifically on the safe withdrawal rate issue but he said that he could see how Valuation-Informed Indexing might well work out; if you support Valuation-Informed Indexing, you implicitly support the idea of taking valuations into consideration when calculating the safe withdrawal rate. The Economist magazine had an article saying that many people have lost confidence in the idea that the safe withdrawal rate is always 4 percent. Todd Tressider stated very strongly that the old studies are in error and gave me full credit for discovering the error and making the case for correction of the studies on the internet. And there have been numerous others.

You are right though that the vast majority of experts get real quiet once they see the death threats and the acts of extortion and the acts of defamation. That sort of thing scares people into silence. That’s why as a nation of people we adopted laws against the use of those sorts of tactics. We need to insist on reasonable enforcement of those laws if we want to advance in our understanding of how stock investing works. I believe that lots of people will be coming forward to do just that in the days following the next price crash. It will be interesting to see how it all plays out.

Rob