“We Would All Benefit From Hearing Shiller Address Every Point That I Have Made Over the Past 20 Years.”

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

When did Shiller say that you should time the market with CAPE?  When has Shiller said he agrees with Rob Bennett?  Your depleted bank account doesn’t agree with you either.

Shiller put out a paper in 1996 in which he said that, given the sky-high CAPE level, investors who stuck with their high stock allocations would live to regret it within 10 years. That’s exactly what I say, that investors need to try to keep their risk profile constant and that it is necessary to engage in market timing to do it.

We would all benefit from hearing Shiller address every point that I have made over the past 20 years. I think he would agree with most of them, perhaps not all of them. But there’s only one way to find out. That’s to drop all the criminal stuff and ask him if he would be willing to respond to questions re all these matters. I am 100 percent sure that he would be willing to help us all out if you Goons would agree to put the criminal stuff on hold. Shiller is a gracious, easygoing guy. Why wouldn’t he be willing to do that?

He hasn’t done it because he does not want to see his career threatened and he does not want to see the lives of his loved one threatened. The criminal stuff is hurting us all. It is killing us. The laws against death threats and again extortion are there for a good reason. Shiller is not the only one who is afraid of that stuff. Bernstein obviously is. Bogle obviouslty was. Pfau is. Kitces is. And on and on and on and on and on.

We will have to as a society revisit the matter in the days following the next price crash, when millions of people will be dealing with some serious hurt that could have been avoided if we had just applied U.S. law in a reasonable way in the investment advice field. I think that we are going to make the right call at that time. But we will just have to wait to see how things play out to find out for sure.

My best wishes.

Rob