Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:
Is there anyone but you, Rob, that has said that they have seen any criminal activity? If so, who would that be?
What matters is what a jury says.
As a nation of people we need to work our way from a place where honest posting re the last 41 years of peer-reviewed research is banned at every site to a place where we are all living the better lives that that resesarch promises. We all want the same thing. There’s not one person alive who doesn’t want to know how to invest effectively. So what is holding us back? It’s the 41-year cover-up. It’s so horrible a reality that the Buy-and-Holders cannot bear to acknowledge it. If Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research were published today, we would be celebrating our good fortune at every site on the internet. But it wasn’t published today, it was published 41 years ago. How do we tell the story of what works in stock investing without telling the story of the 41-year cover-up? We cannot bear to tell that story. And we also cannot bear the thought of enduring another Buy-and-Hold Crisis. What a prediclement!
I’m keeping my eyes on the prize, Anonymous. The prize is opening every site on the internet to honest posting re the last 41 years of peer-reviewed research. How we get there is not my primary concern. I don’t intend to seek prison sentences. But, if getting every site opened to honest posting requires telling the story, then I am going to tell the story. I am indifferent to whether there are prison sentences. But I am not indifferent to getting every site opened to honest posting.
If I tell the story in the days following the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis and there are people who are pissed off about the money they lost and they demand prison sentences, I am not going to play dumb and say “oh, no, no cause for prison sentences here.” Madoff went to prison. This is 500 times bigger than Madoff. If I say “no cause for prison sentences here,” I lose all credibility. There are things that I can say that I believe will reduce those prison sentences a bit and it is my intent to say those things. I cannot promise to you that my efforts in that direction are going to prevail. People are obviously going to be very pissed off. I can’t say that I wouldn’t be demanding prison sentences if I were in their shoes. So I am not going to insult them by playing dumb.
I will do what I can to help you out. That’s all that I can promise. I think that there are some things that I can say that may help a bit. But I cannot say that I have great confidence that the things that I can say will turn the tide. It’s going to come down to how angry people are. I am thinking that they will be pretty darn angry. But there has never been a situation like this before. So no one can know in advance precisely how things will play out. We will just have to wait and see. I wish you the best of luck with it. I’m sorry if that doesn’t sound like much. But I am not in circumstances that make it possible for me to offer much more.
Rob
“What matters is what a jury says.”
Only if the matter comes to a trial. In your 20 year campaign there has never been a single person (other than you) who thinks a trial will happen.
There was a time when the exec utives of tobacco companies were fighting hard to keep people from learning about the research that showed that smoking causes cancer. If you took a poll at the time, the vast majority of the population would have said that there would never be litigation re that issue. But there was. Litigation almost by definiton can only come after a cover-up has been exposed.
There are all kinds of wonderful things that begin happening once this cover-up is exposed. The key is getting it all out in the open, launching a discussion of the realities of stock investing as revealed by the last 42 years of peer-reviewed research at every site on the internet.
My sincere take.
Rob
And in that 20 years, no one, but you, thinks there is any cover up. What information is missing? You have plastered your crap on this website and hundreds of others. Unfortunately for you, no one is buying your crap.
The information that is missing is the pain that millions of people will experience during the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis. A Get Rich Quick approach always possesses appeal for so long as it is putting money in your pocket. The allure is diminished when the imaginary money disappears and you need to rebuild your life.
Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning resesarch was not available until 1981. So, until then, irrational exuberance was just one of those things we had to live with. Starting in 1981, it became optional. The Bennett/Pfau research shows that, once we open every site to honest posting, we can reduce the risk of stock investing by naarly 70 percent. We have not had an extended bear market from 1981 forward. Prices dropped a little below fair-value levels in the wake of the 2008 Buy-and-Hold Crisis. But they recovered within a year. So we have not seen the bad side of irrational exuberance. In the event that stocks continue to perform in the future somewhat as they always have in the past, we will begin seeing that within the next year or two or three. That’s the missing information — the negative side of the rentless promotion of a pure Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold strategy for stock investing.
I hope that helps a tiny bit, Anonymous.
Rob
“ The information that is missing is the pain that millions of people will experience during the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis.”
If it hasn’t happened, then it can’t be missing. Further, you have already made this claim on many websites for over 20 years, so you can’t even claim it is missing.
What you are really saying is that no one believes you.
The majority certainly doesn’t agree with me. If the majority agreed with me, we wouldn’t all be looking at a CAPE value of 29 today.
How do you think that is ever going to change? It’s not going to change by all of us who believe that Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research is legitimate research keeping it zipped to appease you Goons.
Rob
Get back to the point. You said there was a cover up, yet then said your comment related to something that hasn’t happened, but that you think “WILL” happen. Since it hasn’t happed, then there can’t be a cover up. Instead of commenting on that, you just move the conversation in a different direction.
I pointed out the error in the Greaney retirement study (it lacks an adjustment for the valuation level that applies on the day the retirement begins) on the morning of May 13, 2002. It hasn’t been corrected to this day. If that’s not a cover-up, I don’t think I want to know what a cover-up would look like.
Rob