Redwood_1

The Global War Against Shorts: Canada Bans Short-Selling

The answer to your question, which is based on a false premise, seems obvious to me.

The problem never was short selling or those who engage in it. The problem is NAKED short selling and those who not only engage in it but use it aggressively to manipulate markets, further compounded by the fact that even though it has been illegal all along, it has been allowed to happen completely unfettered for so long that the agencies who should be enforcing rules prohibiting it are now powerless to reign it in.

Consequently, the only way to get a handle on it quickly, which was absolutely necessary in order to defuse a situation that would have inevitably led to market meltdown, was to temporarily halt all short selling altogether.

It's far from a perfect solution, but one that has had the desired affect, at least temporarily. It is now encumbent upon the SEC to get ahead of the problem of NAKED short selling, get all the outstanding Failures To Deliver satisfied, and then move forward with a market where orderly short selling is reintroduced in such a fashion that powerful hedge funds can no longer get away with selling what they don't possess nor have any intention of possessing.

The free marketeers who bitch about this action now should have been speaking up over the last several years while the NAKED short problem spun out of control. Since they didn't, they can all STFU now as far as I'm concerned.