Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:
“It’s not exactly news…What good has it done”
So now you’re just a burned-out nihilist. Doing nothing but bitching all day, every day. Which somehow is vitally important to save the world, leaving no time for anything else, like your family for example.
Coming up on your next self-imposed book deadline. The world awaits.
I don’t think that I am a nihilist at all. When I saw your comment, I added an item to the list that I keep of columns that I intend to write for the ValueWalk.com site. The title for that one is “It’s Not Just Getting the Safe Withdrawal Rate Studies Corrected, It’s Coming to Terms With Why We Got Them Wrong.”
There’s no news in knowing that 4 percent is not always safe. Those who have been paying attention have known that for many years, for two decades really. But why did smart people make that mistake and why did other smart people tolerate it for so long? That’s the important question.
The answer is that we all have a Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold urge residing within us. We all want something for nothing. So we lie to ourselves. We tell ourselves that the safe withdrawal rate is the same number when the CAPE is 44 as it is when the CAPE is 8. It’s nonsense, of course. Dangerous nonsense. But it is dangerous nonsense that we all like to hear. It is dangerous nonsense that SELLS.
Will we permit ourselves to advance in our understanding of how stock investing works in the days following the next price crash and live better lives from that point forward as a result? I hope so, you know? I like the humans. So I would like to see them learn what they need to learn so that they can all live better lives.
My best and warmest wishes to you, Miasma.
Rob
“I like the humans. So I would like to see them learn what they need to learn so that they can all live better lives.”
Spoken like the god that you apparently consider yourself. It must so frustrating for a superior being like yourself when we puny humans just won’t listen.
Reason is my God, Anonymous. That’s why I became a journalist. And that’s why, in the days before the first Greaney death threat (August 27, 2002), I was a Buy-and-Holder. I heard that Buy-and-Hold was rooted in peer-reviewed research. I felt that that was the investment strategy for me. I am not the one who came up with the idea of rooting one’s investment strategy in peer-reviewed research. I would say that it was John Bogle who did more than anyone else to popularize the idea.
It has certainly been a frustrating experience to see the error in the Greaney retirement study covered up for 20 years, knowing how many millions of people will be harmed by this massive act of financial fraud in the event that stocks continue to perform in the future anything at all as they always have in the past. Buy I don’t buy into the idea that just because lots of us have tolerated the abusive behavior of the Buy-and-Hold Goons that we are “puny.” Death threats are scary. Threats of career destruction are scary. We are doing the best that we can given the circumstances that we face.
It is my view that the positive side of this story is 50 times more positive than the negative side of this story is negative. The humans who you suggest are “puny” are the ones who saw that Shiller’s research was published in a peer-reviewed journal and who made his book a best-seller and who saw that he was awarded a Nobel prize and who in the thousands expressed a desire that every internet site be opened to honest posting and who made it a felony to engage in sorts of criminal behavior that you Goons have made use of to block millions from learning about the realities of stock investing that they very much need to learn about. We are not perfect creatures. But I think you’ll see that we are not so bad if you look at things in even a slightly balanced way.
The Lindauerheads and the Greaney Goons, however….
I’m joking around a little bit.
Please take good care, old friend.
Rob
It is clear that you are really 8mpressed with yourself. The rest of us are not.
I am highly impressed by Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research and I am proud that after three years of keeping it zipped I worked up the courage to post my honest views on it and then stuck to that course in the face of violent and criminal opposition by a small number of internet Goons.
I wish you all good things, Anonymous. But I also wish the millions of middle-class investors whose lives you are in the process of destroying all good things as well. I believe strongly that those people should be permitted to hear both sides of the story, as U.S. law provides, and then make up their own minds as to how to invest their retirement money. It will be interesting to see how it all plays out.
Rob