Barry Ritholtz just put up a piece saying some people think that because the shorts were coming from London and Dubai, it could be the terroristics trying to bring down the land of the free and home of the brave yet again.
hahahahahahaha. Cheney's psychops boys must be working overtime on the strategery.
Did someone put LSD in the Blue Plains water treatment plant for Washington?

"What the fuck ever happened to efficient markets?"

The wealthy discovered that it's much easier to profit in inefficient markets.

eom

Pardon my ignorance on the markets but don't the shorts serve an important purpose? It seems like banning shorts would increase volatility since there is nothing to protect the bottom if there are no buyers. Why don't they just ban selling all together and allow only buys; then the markets will only go up ;-)

"You have no respect for excessive authority or obsolete traditions. You're dangerous and depraved, and you ought to be taken outside and shot!" - Joseph Heller

(in my amateur's view), partly because of regulation "relaxation".

I don't see anywhere in effect a permanent halt to all of them.

It seems odd to me that some Agonists watching the pre-Friday fire and commenting wrote as if standing somewhere outside the building while the collateral damage of small-time jobs (and a meltdown of the NYC economy) was taking place.

Now that a stupid, overblown badly written special interest friendly bailout proposal is out there to be discussed , I am supposed to tear my hair out instead for the demise of "pure" capitalism circa 2008 personified by the small-time innocent short-seller?

Not.

I want to see "feed on the dying" profiteers including heads of the too big to fail financial firms get nailed.

Is there much of a chance of that happening? Probably not, but not making specific alternative proposals is thumb-sucking.

"Morality depends on whose ox is gored"

_{"The mythical John McCain is an affable, straight-talking, moderately conservative war hero who is an expert on foreign policy" - Bob Herbert}

Or psuedo-capitalism was exposed for what it is — corporate statism under the control of the plutocratic oligarchy. (Did anyone notice that President Bush is in the background and former head of Goldman is running things?)

What's really needed is teeth in cases of failure to deliver, or naked shorting.

How about this? If a failure to deliver occurs, the purchaser shall be reimbursed at the rate of ten times the value of the contact. No settlement periods. If you don't have the shares in your possession when delivery is called, you're penalized for fraud.

Further, instead of simply "borrowing" shares, how about renting them for a prescribed period at a prescribed percentage of their value? Then there would be an up-front cost on a short contract.

Just thinking. And, FWIW, I'm not certain I'm with Barry on this one.

is that no one in this govt gallery of "experts" understands exactly how this economy works. They know how they WANT it to work, but not how it actually functions. I think they're stopping the short selling to try and buy some time to figure out what the hell is happening and to prevent a run on assets. That is a situation they have absolutely no idea how to handle, it never fit into their ideology so they didn't plan for it or ever think about it.

This is the ultimate endpoint when you elect on president based on how much you would like to have a beer with him and not on real qualifications.

Buncha friggin idiots.

I guarantee you I can solve this whole financial crisis if I can just have a beer with the president.

This (I believe) are shorts with a different name. And SPK asks good qustion .

:) This should be called something like: Market Trading Patriot Act

American Express also added; NYSE expands roster by another 30 stocks

MarketWatch, By Ruth Mantell, September 22

WASHINGTON -- Pushing on to shore up the markets, the list of banned short-sale stocks has been expanded to include the likes of General Electric Co., General Motors Corp. and American Express Co.

The three companies' shares are all part of the 30-stock Dow Jones Industrial Average.
GE and GM may not be the most obvious firms to be picked out as financials.

However, GM has a 49% stake in GMAC Financial Services, noted David Healy, an auto-industry analyst.

Meanwhile, GE's commercial finance operations accounted for nearly 20% of revenue for second-quarter continuing operations, while the company's GE Money operations accounted for 14%.

Monday morning, the New York Stock Exchange issued a list of 30 new companies on the short sale ban list. The list is being updated throughout Monday, and possibly through the week, said Scott Peterson, an exchange spokesman.

"Being that we had no easy and quick way to determine if a company met the [SEC's] criteria, we sent a blast email to all of our members asking them to self-certify if they met the criteria," Peterson said.