The SEC "solves" its screw-up by screwing up again
September 19, 2008
– Comments (11)
Wow what a morning. There's lots of news out there. I have been trying to get my hands around what has happened and what it all means. First I will talk about what a disgrace the SEC is. I am completely disgusted with Chris Cox and his friends there. They all should be fired, without packages immediately.
I somewhat understand the need for the temporary ban on short selling, but it should have never gotten to this point. Let me explain.
Yes, many of the companies that the government has had to bail out or that have gone bankrupt were in bad shape and may have eventually gone belly-up anyhow...but hedge funds were accelerating this process to hyper-speed. Here's how they were doing it. They started by floating rumors out there and buying up Credit Default Swaps on companies. When traders and the idiotic ratings agencies (who are as much to blame as anyone for this mess) saw the CDS prices explode they said "wow, this company must really be in trouble" and its stock began to freefall. At the same time that the funds were buying up the CDSs, they were shorting the he-two-sticks out of the company's common stock...accelerating its decline. Hedge funds were going through and picking off companies one at a time. It would have continued and it was creating massive panic, so something had to happen. Unfortunately as usual, the government went too far.
The SEC already had rules on the books to prevent the sort of "naked" short selling that has been absolutely hammering stocks...yet it never enforced them. Furthermore, the SEC eliminated the "uptick" rule so now hedge funds can continue to pound on stocks hammer them into oblivion. If the uptick rule had remained in place and the naked shorting and rumor starting rules been actually enforced this short of rapid targeted destruction of individual companies would not have happened.
Instead of fixing its mistakes, now the SEC has gone way too far in the other direction by banning the short selling of 799 financial stocks (why couldn't they find one more company and just make it an even 800). Where do we live again? Russia, where they can just close the market arbitrarily for days at a time. This is the United States of America and we are supposed to have free markets. Shorting is a necessary part of that...within reason. If the SEC had taken the steps that I outlined above we would have never gotten into this mess so quickly. What does the short selling ban accomplish anyhow? Anyone who really wants to short these companies will just wait until the ban is over and then hammer away. Good greif. These companies still have all sorts of problems. Oh yeah, that's right the government is going to buy all of their bad paper. That should fix things...for them but not the citizens of this country. Hopefully later I will talk about the governments mind-blowing purchase of everything on Earth and its implications for the taxpayer, the economy, and the U.S. dollar.
Oh well, I wasn't short anything anyhow so it's nice to see some green in my portfolio today.
Deej
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