Short Selling BANNED!!!

On September 19th, the U.S. Treasury Secretary Paulson issued a statement in which he said that the Federal government “must implement a program to remove these illiquid assets that are weighing down our financial institutions and threatening our economy”. He called it the ‘Troubled Asset Relief Program’. Many have taken to abbreviating to TARP and from there, it is a short leap of imagination to call it a TRAP.

But, even before the bill is passed and its ramifications known, stock markets around the globe heaved a sigh of relief and rallied hard towards the end of week. It is a delightful irony that most markets showed a flat profile from Friday, September 12th to Friday, September 19th at the end of an unprecedented week. It is not so much the news of the proposed U.S. government bailout that stock market investors welcomed. The squeeze on short-sellers that regulators around the world applied worked its magic.

Short-selling banned but SEC created the conditions

Bulls are taken by their horns but I do not know how bears are tamed. Try banning short selling. Well that is what authorities in the U.S. and the UK did on Thursday. UK banned all short-selling of financial stocks up to January 2009. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in the US banned all naked short-selling in all stocks. Hedge funds have to swear under oath their short positions. Canada, Germany, Ireland, Holland, Taiwan and some others have joined.

That is a shame!! There was no reason for many authorities to impose restrictions on short-selling. It is not only unprecedented but also largely unnecessary.

Forgotten in this persecution of short-sellers is a matter of tiny detail that in 2004, the SEC made two important changes to its rules on the amount of leverage that broker-dealers could take on.
One, it removed the discounts it applied on the assets that these institutions own, in calculating their net capital.
Two, it allowed five broker-dealers to increase their leverage from 12:1 to 40:1. Those five were Merrill, Lehman Bear Stearns, Goldman and Morgan Stanley. Four of them are not around any more. Goldman has reduced itself to a mere Retail Bank.

It is not clear what role the institutions themselves played in this rule change. It appears that the retribution for the egregious errors of the regulators and the regulated entities would be paid by the shortsellers who seek to throw a spotlight on such behaviour. Strange are the turns that American capitalism has taken in the last few years.

Banning short-selling is to akin to "blaming the mirror for the ugly image". But then, these days, one is a suspect capitalist if one does not cheerlead rising asset prices even if the means are not exactly fair.

Any recovery in global equities and the U.S. dollar would eventually turn out to be a comic interlude in an, otherwise, tragic drama except that the comic interlude could last long enough to make us all feel like we were watching a new play all over again.