“Discussion of the Matter Can Be Suppressed for a Time. But the Issue Can Never Go Away. If Market Timing Is Required and All That Investors Can Hear Is That It Never Works, There Are Consequences That Follow From That. Every Earlier Buy-and-Hold Crisis Has Brought on Millions of Failed Retirements and Hundreds of Thousands of Business Failures and Millions of People Thrown Out of Work. Things Like That Tend to Get Written Up in the Papers.”

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

If you are there in person, everyone will have to listen to you. This is your big chance. If this is REALLY your life’s work, you would be there in a heart beat.

If you don’t go, then it just played itself out……which means nothing happens.

The issue played itself out for the time-being because those of us who want to see the national debate take place were overcome by you Goons. But the issue will return over and over and over again in the event that Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research is legitimate research. A world in which valuations affect long-term returns and market timing is always 100 percent required is a very different world than a world in which the market is efficient and timing doesn’t even work. The question at the root of the controversy is a fundamental question re how the market works.

Discussion of the matter can be suppressed for a time. But the issue can never go away. If market timing is required and all that investors can hear is that it never works, there are consequences that follow from that. Every earlier Buy-and-Hold Crisis has brought on millions of failed retirements and hundreds of thousands of business faioures and millions of people thrown out of work. Things like that tend to get written up in the papers. We didn’t have 42 years of peer-reviewed research showing us how to solve those problems in earlier days. But we do now. I see that as a significant difference.

I believe that something will happen. I do not know for certain. I do not have access to a crystal ball. But I believe that the core issue her is too big for nothing to happen. I know which side I want to be standing on when it does, you know?

Rob