Who cares? Shorting is for morons. Shorting has unlimited risk, with limited profit. Besides nobody may catch the exact top. If you plan to bet on falling prices, buy puts instead.
They called that "borrowing fee". I looked back at my statement for August 2008. For example, on 7/24/08, I was charged $27.00 so that I would be able to short X number of shares of GS that day (forgot the exact number, 2000 or 3000, something like that). The more short shares I wanted available the higher the fee I had to pay. Awesome, huh?
sometimes if a stock is hard to borrow but not impossible to borrow there is a fee. $27x 365= about 9000. $4500 per 1000 shares stock was about 180. indicative rate was about -2.5% it is not outrageous.
Why does a five-year old get into adult's business? Stick to starting your one-line clueless topics every now and then. You don't trade, remember? What do you know about shorting? Unlimited risk is for the academics. I have not yet seen a stock's price goes to infinity. (Except may be something like Microsoft. But who would be shorting MSFT for over 20 years?) I have seen plenty of stocks dropped to zero.
Yes. it was Sept '08. My bad. Except that for several weeks, no shorting was allowed. At that time, the indicative rate for many of the financials was over 100%. That was insane!
What's moronic is your statement and it reflects your lack of market understanding and inability to trade.