We all gotta be held to account...

[Zdeerman]

JWR is maybe the most disgusting character to emerge in this whole decade long drama -- he is a person who clearly ought to know better -- Hell, one who I think *does* know better, but still eggs Bennett on for reasons of his own.

John -- When Bennett goes postal, I hope you hold yourself to account for your part in feeding his delusions.

John Walter Russell said, in April 16th, 2009 at 12:03 pm

This is a nice article, but what about competing voices? They want dollars. They will work hard to drown you out. The stakes are high.

Have fun.

John Walter Russell

http://arichlife.passionsaving.com/2009 ... /#comments

[Schroeder]

Rob, you have an interesting angle on this. But I'm not sure middle-class stock investors are the only ones you should be directing your energies.

If you remember the internet and tech stock bubble of the late 1990's, it was the large investment banks that were helping these companies go public. So these large investment banks stood to gain enormous profits by feeding the bubble. Yet Rob, you don't even mention that part of the story.

And then what about the pension fund managers? Rob, you don't talk about the trillions of dollars that pension funds manage. Why aren't you directing your energies to them?

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.

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]

I don't tend to focus on the fault-finding stuff.

Rob

[Schroeder]

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.

I don't believe you. You type those words, yet you don't even address the substance of my post. Why?

How come you haven't addressed the role of the large investment banks in building the internet and tech bubble of the late 1990's?

How come you haven't addressed the role of fund managers at pension funds, hedge funds and insurance companies? These managers control trillions of dollars trading stocks. Aren't they part of the investment community? Yet, you act as if they don't even exist!

Schroeder

[Yipee-Ki-O]

The only thing of import to Hocus is his grudge against John Greaney!