We all gotta be held to account...

[Zdeerman]

[Schroeder]

[hocus2009]

If this is, as you say, a community problem, then you shouldn't exclude the other players in the role they play in the stock market.

I don't exclude anybody, Schroeder.

We all need to know how much money we have. We all need to know how much risk we are taking on.

It's a mistake for all of us to believe in the imaginary world we create when we place our faith in the Efficient Market. The imaginary world does not exist. And all the investing strategies that follow from a belief in the imaginary world do not work.

We survived for a number of years pretending to believe in the imaginary stuff. Some seem to see that as a reason for continuing to believe in the imaginary world. I don't buy it. For two reasons.

One, we barely survived in the earlier days. The Great Depression was a close call. Passivezzz Investing never caused as much human misery in earlier tries as it is likely to this go-around. But it came close.

Two, we are a far richer people today. Believing in imaginary worlds that cause us to get all the numbers in our analysis of money-related questions wrong was a big problem in earlier days. It's an even bigger problem today, when a lot of us need to know about things like safe withdrawal rates to plan our retirements. The more that money matters, the more that it matters to get the numbers right in money-related analyses.

We're all at fault for letting the nonsense go on as long as it has.

I don't tend to focus on the fault-finding stuff. I put that stuff in the doom-and-gloom category. It is discouraging to think about it too much. We should address it to the extent we need to address it to make sense of things and then move on to consideration of the more positive sides of the story, which are significant and life-affirming.

But I certainly acknowledge that just about all of us did something to encourage belief in the imaginary world at one time or another. Bad us! Bad humans!

Rob

[Zdeerman]

[Schroeder]

[Yipee-Ki-O]