ain't no fortunate son

Short Selling: The Free Speech of Wall Street

Jacosa, great comparison, shorts are the undertakers of the dead wood on Wall Street.

Did you happen to see the graphic CNBC kept flashing at lunch time?

"Dow has largest 2 day percentage gain in 79 years, since October 31, 1929. "

How fitting and yet just slightly ironic... October 1929 was a swell time to buy and hold stocks.

Short Selling: The Free Speech of Wall Street

Gordon, everything they have done to manipulate the markets the past 6 months has been tied to politics and keeping the Dow above 11,000.. look at the steps they have taken each time it breaks below 11,000 and people start to panic, that's the level where they start losing votes.

They opened up the discount window to the IB's for what? To provide capital for lending, or to repair balance sheets? NO WAY!!!!!!!!!!

They did it to give their friends the financials enough firepower to make incredible trading profits whipping the markets both ways, grabbing a piece each way, to help partially offset their subprime losses.

But the price for those hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars? "You keep this damn market above 11,000 or we all go down the tubes".

Short Selling: The Free Speech of Wall Street

Spot on OldLimey... the future looks bleak.

Make no doubt about it, what they have done to kill America's cherished tradition of free and open markets they fully intend to do to the Constitution, and the book burning attempts by Palin are a clear example of what we cam expect from this terrifying group of criminals.

We're on the brink of a police state.

Short Selling: The Free Speech of Wall Street

gybog, you're insane... you just described the personality traits of the financial executives that put us in this mess in the first place, destroyed the concept of free markets, and are traits which the LONGS possess in full and equal quantity as the shorts.

You obviously don't have a single clue about the difference between legitimate short selling which has been a valuable and incremental part of free markets since they were started, and naked short selling which the SEC refused to enforce for years because it was their friends in the financial industry who were profiting from it at the expense of the little guy.... you really ought to read a little bit before you make uninformed and totally wrong statements like you did.

Naked shorting is done by the hedge funds who were spawned by the brokerages... which Cox refused to do anything about because they were his friends... now they're eating their own and all of a sudden these monstrous hypocrites are crying foul and begging the taxpayer who they have ripped off for years to bail them out.

And the concept of free markets has died as a result.

Despicable, and aided and abetted y well meaning but uninformed and naive investors like you who have no idea what they're talking about.

Short Selling: The Free Speech of Wall Street

Sad to say, but the law of unintended consequences will no doubt come into play when the full impact of this disgraceful period of governmental intervention and manipulation is felt in the markets.

They have applied imperfect hedges and bandages, and restricted the freedom of markets, price discovery, liquidity... because they couldn't figure out a way to fix the broken balance sheets of hundreds of financial companies that had broken all the rules of common sense and transparency.

It is financial fascism, not capitalism.

First you couldn't short THEIR 19 stocks.

Now you can't short THEIR 799 stocks.

But what about the other 7000-8000?

There is an adage in the markets... if you can't sell what you want, sell what you can.

What hath God wrought?