Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:
The Greaney issue has been addressed. You just don’t like the answer. Why do you still keep repeating it? It isn’t helping. If fact, it just continues to hurt you because people have long grown tired of having to repeat themselves over and over again, while you hijack and fill up threads. It is a huge waste of time. It is just one of many reasons why you get banned.
The 19-year cover-up of the error in the Greaney retirement study is a public policy matter of critical importance. Say that there is a one-in-a-hundred chance that I was right in what I said in my famous post from the morning of May 13, 2002. The odds are a lot higher than that. More like a 99.999-in a hundred chance. But let’s just say that the odds are one-in-a-hundred for purposes of discussion, If that’s so, then we should be discussing the question on every discussion board and blog on the internet.
The 4 percent rule is not something that Greaney made up himself. That rule was cited in thousands of newspaper articles. Hundreds of thousands of investment advisers cited that rule in retirement planning advice that they advanced to their clients. Millions of retirement plans were constructed with the 4 percent rule in mind. If it really is so that that rule was constructed without the effect of valuations being considered, we are looking at the biggest act of financial fraud in the history of the United States. BY FAR. If you added together the dollar losses caused by every act of financial fraud in the history of the United States, the number wouldn’t come close to being equal to the dollar losses caused by this one 19-year cover-up.
Fair enough?
Rob
“The 19-year cover-up of the error in the Greaney retirement study is a public policy matter of critical importance.”
“The 4 percent rule is not something that Greaney made up himself.”
Umm, then why do you only pound on Greaney, and not the guy who made up the rule?
Maybe because Greaney called you an idiot and coined the term “hocomania.”
Twenty years is a long time to hold a grudge.
I’ve told others who have recommended use of the 4 percent rule that they were wrong to do so. I exchanged several e-mails with Bill Bengen. I told Michael Kitces that he was wrong to say that the safe withdrawal rate can go higher than 4 percent but not lower. I told Scott Burns that he should not continue promoting the rule. I urged Wade Pfau to write to the authors of the Trinity study to ask them to correct their study, which he did. I have said that Bill Bernstein did a wonderful thing when he wrote in his book that the 4 percent rule was off by a full two percentage points at the top of the bubble but that he needed to do more to make that reality better known by talking about it on discussion boards to which he posted. I don’t say that only Greaney made the error.
I “pound” on Greaney because he is the one who engaged in criminal behavior to shut down discussion of the error in his study after hundreds of fine people expressed a desire to be able to talk about it and to learn the correct number. None of the others advanced death threats or demands for unjustified board bannings or thousands of acts of defamation or acts of extortion aiming to silence academic researchers who have so-authored peer-reviewed research showing that “Yes, Virginia, Valuation-Informed Indexing works!”
I am the one who has been telling you Goons for 19 years now that you are hurting Greaney in a very serious way by continuing this massive cover-up. I am Greaney’s best friend in the world. I have been that since the first day and it is my intent to continue to be that. The cover-up hurts everyone. But in the end it will probably hurt Greaney more than anyone else.
My sincere take.
Rob