Word: short
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Lehman CEO Dick Fuld complained loudly to the SEC earlier this year that his company was the victim of shorts such as David Einhorn, of Greenlight Capital, for badmouthing the company's accounting. Einhorn was unapologetic. Fuld got some action after the SEC sought to stop naked shorting with a do-not-mess-with" list of 18 financial institutions such as Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and investment banks. On July 15, the SEC issued an emergency order temporarily mandating that anyone who wants to short a stock "must borrow or arrange to borrow the security or otherwise have the security...
...Short sellers borrow stock and sell it, essentially betting that the price of their target company will fall before they have to replace the borrowed shares. They have been disparaged as vultures, rumor mongers, cheats and criminals. But they have not, by and large, been wrong in their choice of targets. Bear and Lehman died because they were undercapitalized. Merrill's own mismanagement helped to chase it into the arms of B of A. Yet in the case of AIG, the argument is that the company would have remained afloat had its stock price not been driven down, which triggered...
Yesterday, SEC Commissioner Cox responded to the pressure. The SEC instituted a "Hard T+3 Close-Out Requirement," meaning that short sellers and their broker-dealers must deliver securities by the close of business on the settlement, three days after the sale. It's an answer to previous complaints about the prevalence of so-called "naked" short selling: that is, selling shares that you don't actually have in hand, and have not made arrangements to have. Naked shorting allows traders to potentially manipulate stocks. The SEC is also considering an emergency order forcing hedge funds, which employ short selling...
Last year the SEC let the longstanding uptick rule expire, which stipulated that traders could short a stock only after it had moved up. Cox called the rule useless, because an uptick can be just a penny in the decimalized market. His view is supported by academics such as MIT's Paul Asquith, who has done extensive research on short sales. Asquith reviewed two years of data during which short trades were tracked by the SEC, and found that 30% of all trades are short sales. And outfits including Goldman and Morgan Stanley are no strangers to going short...
...Barack Obama: Democrats have long argued for greater reproductive freedom. Do you think that should include the right to choose the sex of your child? The same genetic tests that screen for terrible diseases could in theory target many other predispositions. What if prospective parents could screen for short or shy or gay or blond? This is a largely unregulated universe of treatment; should...