Yes. Naked short-selling clearly can be used to manipulate the prices of stocks.
The question is whether it has been used
From a regulatory perspective, the fact that this is an exploit waiting to happen is sufficient reason to rewrite REG SHO. If you found a security exploit in your code, would you wait until you could prove somebody was exploiting it before you fixed it? Probably not.
I don't know if naked shorts attacked the large investment banks. However, I do know one thing that was left out of the register article: investment banks would be an ideal target for unscrupulous naked shorting. Investment banks are highly leveraged. By driving down the stock price you directly cause the bank to lose solvency and liquidity. If the price drops faster than the bank can reallocate and deleverage then it can be driven into bankruptcy. So the price response to an increase in supply is very non-linear. This could even destroy a perfectly healthy bank, to say nothing to the troubled investment banks of 2008.
Don't know if naked shorts contributed to the collapse of investment banks or not, but investment banks would be the perfect target for a naked short sale attack.
Investment banks are highly leveraged institutions that borrow lots of money. Long story short: drops in asset prices impair the banks solvency and liquidity. This further produces downward pressure on asset prices. So you don't need to naked short the bank through very many price floors before you cause a panic. Even though it's a massively capitalized institution, medium-sized shocks can have very non-linear effects.
I don't know to what extent naked shorting contributed to the decline, but I do know that those banks were the ripest of targets.
In every market you've got supply and demand. They balance at the asset price.
Then comes naked short selling. The naked short sellers don't need to borrow shares before they sell them. So unscrupulous agents start creating supply out of thin air. What happens next? As every fool knows, an increase in supply causes the price to drop. Unscrupulous parties continue to naked short the stock, saturating demand through successive price floors. As the price drops, stop-loss orders are activated, exacerbating the decline. Momentum traders will also short the stock. Pretty soon the share price has crashed, the company faces bankruptcy, but the perpetrators can easily cover their position at bottom dollar making millions. All of this is perfectly legal under SEC's rules regarding short sales, REG SHO.
Naked short sales completely destroy the relationship between supply and demand. It allows well connected insiders to make millions or even billions by ruining the market for everybody else.
So much confusion it's hard to know where to start...
The quotes you have are from 2003. This is before the housing boom. At the time, Freddie and Fannie were in fine shape. The quotes of Waters et al were entirely true.
Futhermore, Freddie and Fannie weren't even engaged in debt securitization or sublime lending, the two mechanisms that desperately needed regulation and caused this crisis. Freddie and Fannie were vicitims of the Housing Bust caused by investment banks and regulation would not have protected them.
Futhermore, Frank was the one who wrote Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005 in the first place! He voted against it because the Republicans butchered it in committee.
Futhermore, The Republicans were in control. They had the majority in Congress and the Presidency. They could have done whatever they wanted. They didn't. They abdicted their responsibility and now they are frantically pointing the finger and Barney Frank and everybody else. They are desperate to paint themselves as victims of democrats and racial minority. Give me a break. The Repuclicans aren't victims, they're pussies who can't accept responsibility for the consequences of their rule.
It's not true to say that Frank waited until 2007 to awaken to regulatory issues.
Frank proposed the FEDERAL HOUSING FINANCE REFORM ACT OF 2005 which was before the housing crisis had manifested.
Furthermore, the housing crisis was largely a product of subprime lending. By law, F&F were prohibited from engaging in subprime lending. F&F didn't create the problem they fell victim to. F&F were engaging in legitimate lending, but they were not setup to be resilient against a national wide decline in home values.
Whoops. I posted the wrong link. Indeed, that link does suggest appear to directly contradict my claims. I apologize.
However, the fact remains that Frank did advocate increased regulation of Freddie & Fannie. Here's a bill, FEDERAL HOUSING FINANCE REFORM ACT OF 2005, that Frank wrote which clearly delineates the necessary reforms.
So? None of his links justify his claim that Barney Frank "stopped many legislation attempts to regulate Fannie Mae." That's an baseless argument he got from god-knows-where.
Barney Frank did institute legislation. Here's your link
I made no claim that the parent was a Republican. He (or she) might be a Republican. Or he might be a credulous fool parroting right-wing misinformation who happens to be a Democrat. But regardless of his party affiliation, he's shameless propagating ridiculous right-wing falsehoods.
You're so full of misinformation. Barney Frank was the one who passed regulations on Freddie & Fannie. In July 2007 Frank became chairman and he and the Democrats passed regulations within two months. These regulations had been blocked by the house Republicans since 1994.
It's incredible that the Republicans claim the big mean Democrats prevented them from instituting a proper regulatory framework despite over a decade of Republican majorities in the House and Senate.
So you are saying that we DO know the details, but you are criticizing the OP because the details are hidden? Which is it?
We don't know the specifics of the program and, your lame attempt at Gotcha notwithstanding, I never claimed we did. We don't know the scope, the targets, how long data is retained, who has access to that data, nor how that data is propagated across agencies. I criticized the OP because he blithely repeated unsubstantiated claims about the program as fact.
Do you think it's justifiable to invent claims or repeat-as-fact the dubious claims of known liars?
Oh, and if it's a "beyond-top-secret classified government program", why does everyone and it's brother know it exists?
The reason people know of the existence of the classified warrantless surveillance program is, as every fool knows, because several concerned whistle-blowers came forward and disclosed illegal details of the program to the NYTimes. The NYTimes then wrote a famous article describing the known details of the lawless surveillance program. You should consider reading it. You might learn something, especially with your A in "Reading Comprehension".
No, your point was that the American surveillance program was a safe, anodyne program with limited and necessary objectives and could not possibly be compared to the ubiquitous surveillance state of China. That's why you baselessly claimed to know the design of a beyond-top-secret classified government program:
The NSA program was designed to listen in on US citizens talking to people on a known terrorist list
Then, for no intelligent reason, this submission is typical anti-China propaganda about bogus allegations that have been hashed, rehashed, and Mu Shu Pork Lo Mein hashed to death. Submitter is grasping at straws to draw a moronic parallel between the limited and lawful use of technology in China and the secret prisons, state-sanctioned torture, warrantless eavesdropping on U.S. citizens, process-less and indefinite imprisonments, and the virtual abolition of Fourth Amendment guarantees of the USA.
What you did was repeat a baseless fairy tale about what the NSA program "was designed" to do, even though this lawless program has never been scrutinized or investigated by anybody and doesn't have a shred of oversight.
The instant a company can undercut you by cheaper labor, they will do so. In that sense, it does not matter whether you are unionized or not. If you think you are being protected from being undercut by your refusal to unionize then you are operating under a myth that companies will not undercut complicit employees. Who knows how people end up with these weird beliefs in corporate altruism: companies explicitly declare that all they care about is profit and that's all that shareholders demand.
What unions do is provide workers collective bargaining. With collective bargaining workers are able to secure better terms, possibly including protections from being undercut by cheap labor.
WWII may have the current world record for civilian killing, but there's a good chance that record will be broken. Historically, those records last rarely last more than a hundred years. And it's not as if we're in danger of perpetual world peace.
Japan isn't going to build it alone. Japan is located at ~35 degrees N. For both construction purposes and to minimize the coriolis effect during usage, you would want to build the elevator on the equator exactly. Factor in other issues such as weather, geological activity, political stability, ocean access, and there only a few potential candidates right now. Brazil might work.
Unlike the Apollo program the space elevator won't be built, designed or operated by one country. I believe it will be an international organization analogous to CERN.
Trapped CO2 that is pumped into the ground reacts with minerals and eventually is incorporated in stable ground solids. It would be very difficult to get the oxygen back out.
It's true that it would take a long time for us to use up our atmosphere. Sequestered CO2 might be a good short-term solution, but if we were to follow the recommendations in the coal industry's "clean coal" ad campaign, then we would be looking at easily burning up 0.5% of our total atmosphere in the next 100 years.
Dear Retard:
Plants can only decompose atmospheric carbon dioxide, not C02 that has been trapped and injected "into the ground", which is neither atmospheric nor does it even remain C02. That's why they call it "trapped".
Slashdot Mirror
From a regulatory perspective, the fact that this is an exploit waiting to happen is sufficient reason to rewrite REG SHO. If you found a security exploit in your code, would you wait until you could prove somebody was exploiting it before you fixed it? Probably not.
I don't know if naked shorts attacked the large investment banks. However, I do know one thing that was left out of the register article: investment banks would be an ideal target for unscrupulous naked shorting. Investment banks are highly leveraged. By driving down the stock price you directly cause the bank to lose solvency and liquidity. If the price drops faster than the bank can reallocate and deleverage then it can be driven into bankruptcy. So the price response to an increase in supply is very non-linear. This could even destroy a perfectly healthy bank, to say nothing to the troubled investment banks of 2008.
Don't know if naked shorts contributed to the collapse of investment banks or not, but investment banks would be the perfect target for a naked short sale attack.
Investment banks are highly leveraged institutions that borrow lots of money. Long story short: drops in asset prices impair the banks solvency and liquidity. This further produces downward pressure on asset prices. So you don't need to naked short the bank through very many price floors before you cause a panic. Even though it's a massively capitalized institution, medium-sized shocks can have very non-linear effects.
I don't know to what extent naked shorting contributed to the decline, but I do know that those banks were the ripest of targets.
In every market you've got supply and demand. They balance at the asset price.
Then comes naked short selling. The naked short sellers don't need to borrow shares before they sell them. So unscrupulous agents start creating supply out of thin air. What happens next? As every fool knows, an increase in supply causes the price to drop. Unscrupulous parties continue to naked short the stock, saturating demand through successive price floors. As the price drops, stop-loss orders are activated, exacerbating the decline. Momentum traders will also short the stock. Pretty soon the share price has crashed, the company faces bankruptcy, but the perpetrators can easily cover their position at bottom dollar making millions. All of this is perfectly legal under SEC's rules regarding short sales, REG SHO.
Naked short sales completely destroy the relationship between supply and demand. It allows well connected insiders to make millions or even billions by ruining the market for everybody else.
So much confusion it's hard to know where to start ...
The quotes you have are from 2003. This is before the housing boom. At the time, Freddie and Fannie were in fine shape. The quotes of Waters et al were entirely true.
Futhermore, Freddie and Fannie weren't even engaged in debt securitization or sublime lending, the two mechanisms that desperately needed regulation and caused this crisis. Freddie and Fannie were vicitims of the Housing Bust caused by investment banks and regulation would not have protected them.
Futhermore, Frank was the one who wrote Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005 in the first place! He voted against it because the Republicans butchered it in committee.
Futhermore, The Republicans were in control. They had the majority in Congress and the Presidency. They could have done whatever they wanted. They didn't. They abdicted their responsibility and now they are frantically pointing the finger and Barney Frank and everybody else. They are desperate to paint themselves as victims of democrats and racial minority. Give me a break. The Repuclicans aren't victims, they're pussies who can't accept responsibility for the consequences of their rule.
It's not true to say that Frank waited until 2007 to awaken to regulatory issues.
Frank proposed the FEDERAL HOUSING FINANCE REFORM ACT OF 2005 which was before the housing crisis had manifested. Furthermore, the housing crisis was largely a product of subprime lending. By law, F&F were prohibited from engaging in subprime lending. F&F didn't create the problem they fell victim to. F&F were engaging in legitimate lending, but they were not setup to be resilient against a national wide decline in home values.
Whoops. I posted the wrong link. Indeed, that link does suggest appear to directly contradict my claims. I apologize. However, the fact remains that Frank did advocate increased regulation of Freddie & Fannie. Here's a bill, FEDERAL HOUSING FINANCE REFORM ACT OF 2005, that Frank wrote which clearly delineates the necessary reforms.
So? None of his links justify his claim that Barney Frank "stopped many legislation attempts to regulate Fannie Mae." That's an baseless argument he got from god-knows-where. Barney Frank did institute legislation. Here's your link
I made no claim that the parent was a Republican. He (or she) might be a Republican. Or he might be a credulous fool parroting right-wing misinformation who happens to be a Democrat. But regardless of his party affiliation, he's shameless propagating ridiculous right-wing falsehoods.
You're so full of misinformation. Barney Frank was the one who passed regulations on Freddie & Fannie. In July 2007 Frank became chairman and he and the Democrats passed regulations within two months. These regulations had been blocked by the house Republicans since 1994.
It's incredible that the Republicans claim the big mean Democrats prevented them from instituting a proper regulatory framework despite over a decade of Republican majorities in the House and Senate.
We don't know the specifics of the program and, your lame attempt at Gotcha notwithstanding, I never claimed we did. We don't know the scope, the targets, how long data is retained, who has access to that data, nor how that data is propagated across agencies. I criticized the OP because he blithely repeated unsubstantiated claims about the program as fact. Do you think it's justifiable to invent claims or repeat-as-fact the dubious claims of known liars?
The reason people know of the existence of the classified warrantless surveillance program is, as every fool knows, because several concerned whistle-blowers came forward and disclosed illegal details of the program to the NYTimes. The NYTimes then wrote a famous article describing the known details of the lawless surveillance program. You should consider reading it. You might learn something, especially with your A in "Reading Comprehension".
Jing Xu writes:
So, we have an interesting report about China.
Then, for no intelligent reason, this submission is typical anti-China propaganda about bogus allegations that have been hashed, rehashed, and Mu Shu Pork Lo Mein hashed to death. Submitter is grasping at straws to draw a moronic parallel between the limited and lawful use of technology in China and the secret prisons, state-sanctioned torture, warrantless eavesdropping on U.S. citizens, process-less and indefinite imprisonments, and the virtual abolition of Fourth Amendment guarantees of the USA.
Submitter is a troll.
What you did was repeat a baseless fairy tale about what the NSA program "was designed" to do, even though this lawless program has never been scrutinized or investigated by anybody and doesn't have a shred of oversight.
They didn't claim the site was "complete". Anyway, if they only include constructive proofs then Godel's Theorem is not relevant
The instant a company can undercut you by cheaper labor, they will do so. In that sense, it does not matter whether you are unionized or not. If you think you are being protected from being undercut by your refusal to unionize then you are operating under a myth that companies will not undercut complicit employees. Who knows how people end up with these weird beliefs in corporate altruism: companies explicitly declare that all they care about is profit and that's all that shareholders demand. What unions do is provide workers collective bargaining. With collective bargaining workers are able to secure better terms, possibly including protections from being undercut by cheap labor.
WWII may have the current world record for civilian killing, but there's a good chance that record will be broken. Historically, those records last rarely last more than a hundred years. And it's not as if we're in danger of perpetual world peace.
Japan isn't going to build it alone. Japan is located at ~35 degrees N. For both construction purposes and to minimize the coriolis effect during usage, you would want to build the elevator on the equator exactly. Factor in other issues such as weather, geological activity, political stability, ocean access, and there only a few potential candidates right now. Brazil might work.
Unlike the Apollo program the space elevator won't be built, designed or operated by one country. I believe it will be an international organization analogous to CERN.
This just in ... The UK has now banned all images and depictions of fear sticks on the popular internet video site, YouTube.
we'll just breathe that I guess.
Some decaying plant matter will turn into atmospheric CO2, none of it will turn into trapped CO2.
Trapped CO2 that is pumped into the ground reacts with minerals and eventually is incorporated in stable ground solids. It would be very difficult to get the oxygen back out. It's true that it would take a long time for us to use up our atmosphere. Sequestered CO2 might be a good short-term solution, but if we were to follow the recommendations in the coal industry's "clean coal" ad campaign, then we would be looking at easily burning up 0.5% of our total atmosphere in the next 100 years.
When plants die they leave behind carbon, not trapped C02.
Dear Retard: Plants can only decompose atmospheric carbon dioxide, not C02 that has been trapped and injected "into the ground", which is neither atmospheric nor does it even remain C02. That's why they call it "trapped".
The carbon does go somewhere. It's called "soil".