More on that issue of profiting from when a company's share price goes down

"If it [naked short selling] lowers share prices, that is because companies were overvalued. If the companies get into trouble as a consequence, that is because they were bad companies, not good ones. Bad companies deserve to be punished for being bad companies, so that capital can be better allocated elsewhere. (And yes, I am talking about the benefits of making it easy to take short positions *in general* rather than talking about the naked/covered distinction, which is a technical issue that I don't actually think matters much. It may actually be better to discourage this and instead encourage people to take short positions via derivatives markets, which they can easily do). The truth is that we have had massive capital misallocation in recent decades. Capital has been far too cheap, and much investment has gone to all kinds of stupid places where it cannot generate a genuine economic return. Many companies have believed that they were good companies when in fact all they were doing was milking the fact that they had an unrealistically cheap cost of capital. For the last five years or so, this state of affairs has been ending, which is horribly painful. It would be over quickly if more people (politician, homeowners, and stakeholders in companies doing useless thing) would actually get it into their stupid heads that it has to end."

Our own Michael Jennings, whose comment on my post of yesterday was too good to leave in the associated thread. I suspect this DVD, The Wall Street Conspiracy, will soon be heading for the trash can. I am wary of any "documentary" that starts from the premise that people in financial markets are like Bond villains destroying profitable firms in ways that make no sense even for the supposed "villains" in the case. For me, the key issue is transparency: if you are shorting a stock in a firm or whatever, and your counterparty is fully consenting to the transaction and you both understand the risks and don't expect to get bailed out, then such activity should be put in the same category, IMHO, as off-piste skiing - risky but not criminal and certainly not fraudulent.