Looting the American Coffers. Discussion About the Stock Market Weirdness. Predictions.

Never was a free market and by the looks of things, it never will be.

Trying to ban short-selling is like telling us we can only do addition, never subtraction. It’s idiotic.

When you short a stock, you’re “borrowing” the stock from someone else and have to repay it eventually. The other person still owns the stock, and they are “going long”. If the stock goes down, it costs you less to repay the loan that it was worth at the start, so you make money.

This means that someone else thinks the stock will go up and that when you repay the loan they will make more that it was worth.

In other words, if you ban short-selling, you are also banning other people from going long.

We need to balance out the bail-outs.
As Horowitz said, there is a moral/ethical problem with the bail-outs: why should any bank CEO be concerned about taking risks if they know the government will always bail them out?

Here’s a way to balance the equation: if a bank or company (like GM, Ford) gets a government bail-out, the CEO and the top executives of the company get executed. Preferably in public, if the most disgusting and gruesome method imaginable.

So the public is protected, and the CEOs of other companies learn that risk-taking has some downside.

Are they banning ALL short selling? I knew that Chris Cox (SEC Chair) had a problem with “naked” short selling – selling shares you haven’t even borrowed, expecting to buy them for less than you paid to sell them..!

it’s hard to object to the government’s mass bailouts from a historical standpoint since similar debt-producing methods were put into action to save the U.S. from the Depression; maybe we’re really socialists at heart and don’t want to admit it…