Heck, how come when the tech bubble burst, there is not a single peep about tech rescue? Red, I am with you on the mortgage stuff. Just that we can't sell it like what you said. We have to sell it like Paulson.. "Without our sacrifice to be responsible to our own debt, our country will collapse like Argentina in 2001 a week from now"
amazing how fast people went from gloating about their home appreciation, to demanding that they be bailed out of thier losses i never owned an internet stock, but got hit HARD by the tech break - i never used a penny of debt to buy any of it i never asked for a bailout but i do ask people to keep their hand out of my wallet their gains were theirs - so are their losses - how much were they planning to discount their house price to help those who missed out if the prices held?
Every trader I know has made more dough since that archaic rule was done away with. Market makers could short downticks anyway. Anyone trading US equities who can't make more with that rule gone and all the volatility we've had in the last year should look for another profession.
Japan has no uptick rule, and they don't have a banking crisis. Other countries ban shorting and have had bigger falls. A banking crisis has nothing to do with share price movements, it is entirely driven by fundamental decisions about loan-standards and leverage. Notice how USB, WFC, JPM etc are not getting killed by naked shorting, shorting on a downtick, or $100k FDIC. I wonder why that is? Could it be because they actually followed sound banking practices? All this BS is just a modern version of "shoot the messenger". The culprit is insane leverage and unconscionably reckless greed-driven gambling by grey-suited clueless risk-loving bank and FNM/FRE executive multi-millionaires on the taxpayers dollar, along with equally reckless greedy real estate speculation by a minority of the hopelessly ignorant American/Western public without regard to their ability to repay. Add in a complete lack of regulatory oversight and some predatory selling, and you get the current mess, which many of us were warning about for 3-4 years before today. How about people blame and punish the culprits, instead of the Cassandras.