July 27, 2008
I have a recent quote from Howard Kunstler:
"With naked shorting, however, the stocks being shorted are basically non-existent, imaginary, made-up, fictional, registered only as pixels in a program. It's a racket, pure and simple, run by both the supposed borrower of the stocks and the supposed lender and, more to the point, was wholly and absolutely against the law before the SEC declared a selective holiday from it last week. So, what the SEC action really demonstrates is the utter lawlessness reigning on Wall Street, and the SEC's singular unfitness as an enforcer of the laws, not to mention the criminal irresponsibility of the clearing authorities who only pretend to go through the motions of certifying the sales. What's more, the companies cherry-picked for immunity against shorting were some of the very companies believed to be most active in profiting off naked short sales against other companies."