An Evening with John Bogle: From Wall Street to Your Street

Filmed at a Philadelphia public-TV station and guided by PBS's MoneyTrack co-hosts Pam Krueger and Jack Gallagher, this program features John C. Bogle—respected founder of Vanguard Funds—who talks about the aftermath of the global financial crash of 2008. In the first half, Krueger interviews Bogle, while in the second part, Krueger and Bogle take questions from the audience and from “investors in the street” interviewed by Gallagher. Wall Street—at least the contemporary version, which Bogle calls more greed-mutated, self-serving, and untrustworthy than in the 1950s, when he started his career—comes in for a whipping as being responsible for the “great defeat” of capitalism, as middle-managers took advantage of clients' money, trading and selling bad debts and gambling away peoples' savings while grabbing the greatest cut for themselves, like croupiers in a casino (an Occupy protester could hardly have said it better). The only way to beat Wall Street (aside from abstaining altogether) is to have the most diversified portfolio possible (such as in indexed mutual funds like Vanguard), Bogle counsels, while also talking about his book Enough: True Measures of Money, Business and Life, which exhorts against mindless avarice and runaway consumption. Serving up solid basic investment principles and helpful counseling about fiscal responsibility, this is recommended. Aud: P. (C. Cassady)