The real problem at the SEC is its mysterious decision to remove the uptick rule in July 2007, just as the crisis in the financials was about to explode.

Gee

indeed, wonder why ?

There exists a book in and of itself on that subject

Boy oh Boy – imagine someone who knew how to play shorting with no uptick

I bet there are some recently made wealthy folks out there in the last year.

Now … Me ? And I bet this Muriel Siebert too – would say to someone reaping a fortune from shorting ? or naked shorting ? or exloiting commodities ?

hey – is that real work ?

is that labor contributive to ones community ? I suppose it depends if you spend the money on a porsche or a new business that creates jobs ?

I say I’m selling you something, but I’m selling you nothing. You give me money, and I give you squat. i.e. I am using your money for free. And it generates trading statistics that aren’t really trades, affecting the stock price in the direction helpful to my shorting. That seems to be market manipulation.

So the difference between naked shorting a stock and buying out of the money puts is that one directly influences the price of the stock to my benefit, while the other doesn’t.

Incidentally, it would only be right that with covered shorting, the owner of the shares, not the broker, gets the rent for their borrowing. If they don’t, that too is criminal, as the broker is using your property to do you economic harm. You have a long position, so you want the stock to go up, but the broker is renting your property to generate sales in the market, making money from your asset by lowering the price of the stock, directly contrary to your interests.

Cox according to editorial quoted by EM above claims naked shorting does not occur with the 19. Man, he, Paulson and Bush must have nightly seances with beings which got off those UFOs on the white house lawn June 15th. For Cox’s edification a seance is “…a form of mediumship in which one or more people communicate with entities on another frequency…”.

When in-the-know speculators found out the 19 were going to be protected from what Cox claims is not an illegal or even occurring practice, many of them shot up. (That is the stocks shot up, not the speculators – but then you never know.) If they weren’t in danger from naked short selling why protect them from it? Am I getting this: These named 19 financials (but none of the others) need protection from a practice that is not occurring because stockholders have lost confidence? Which frequency was that on Mr. Chairman?

Oh yeah, this guy was confirmed by a congress that has a 9% approval rating and appointed by a President with maybe a fifth of the voters approving his ’service’ to the country.