“I Will Not Be Pushing for Prison Sentences for You Goons. I Intend to Take It the Other Way. I Am Going to Make the Case for Why We Should Show Mercy to You Goons. For Example, I Am Going to Point Out That a Lot of People at the Motley Fool Board Would Have Been Taking a Withdrawal Rate HIGHER Than 4 Percent If It Had Not Been for Greaney’s Study. That Study Helped People.”

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 have been telling people they are going to prison for over 15 years.  You have also been talking about legal settlements of $500 million.  When are you going to start taking all this legal action?

Our laws are set up to protect us as a community. Under ordinary circumstances, there would be universal agreement that criminal behavior by Buy-and-Holders should be no more tolerated than criminal behavior by anyone else. But we are not living under ordinary circumstances when the CAPE level is 35, two times fair value.

Think that would happen if I were granted my desire to see every site on the internet opened to honest posting re the last 41 years of peer-reviewed research in this field. Most investors would act in their rational self-interest and would lower their stock allocation. That would bring stock prices down by 50 percent. Millions of people would suffer failed retirements. People would cut back on spending and hundreds of thousands of businesses would go under. Millions of people would be thrown out of work. Political frictions would increase.

Who needs any of that, right?

So the bull market continues. Buy-and-Hold survives another day.

I believe that, when we all experience the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis, there will be a larger number of people who will work up the courage to stand up to the Buy-and-Hold Goon Squads. We now have about 10 percent who believe that Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research is legitimate research. If we get to 20 percent, I believe that that will be enough to get the ball rolling. Eventually, we all will be living better lives.

I will not be pushing for prison sentences for you Goons. I intend to take it the other way. I am going to make the case for why we should show mercy to you Goons. For example, I am going to point out that a lot of people at the Motley Fool board would have been taking a withdrawal rate HIGHER than 4 percent if it had not been for Greaney’s study. That study helped people (that’s not all it did, but it did do that). If my words are enough to get you off, that will make me happy. I don’t think that my words are going to have enough power to do that. But we’ll see, you know? There has never before been a situation like this. So I don’t think that anyone can know in advance precisely what is going to happen.

My job is to steer us as a nation to a place where we are all living betters lives from that point forward. I don’t believe that the answer is for me to start saying that I believe that the Greaney retirement study contains a valuation adjustment. So I am not going to do that. I am going to do the best that I can do for every single person involved, including you Goons, without going to the wrong side of the felony line doing it.

I hope that that makes at least a tiny bit of sense to you, Anonymous. I naturally wish you all good things.

Rob