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Comment by mattmaroon | Hacker News Reader

It's not that I disagree with you, I really don't have enough knowledge to decide. I haven't the slightest clue how long they want to prevent short selling for (I think the article got cut off since I don't subscribe) or what sort of effect that short term action might have.

I was just wondering how you came to the decision that it's stupid. It seems you'd need a lot of knowledge to be reasonably sure of that, given that other people with a lot of knowledge made the decision.

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I would argue that this was a political driven decision rather than an economical one.

How so?

"Those speculators betting on the stock market falling are ruining the economy. How dare they bet on things going down!"

It's too much of a coincidence that this move is effected a few days after McCain publicly chastised SEC Chairman Chris Cox and said he would fire him if he were president.

Has McCain spoken out in favor of something like this? This would seem to be pretty out of line with typical Republican doctrine. I don't see this as being an attempt to save his job, it's clearly not going to happen if McCain is elected.

McCain is often pretty out of line with typical Republican doctrine. I'm not sure the ban is specifically a McCain thing, but it does seem very political. Far fewer people complained about rich Wall Street fat cats when those fat cats got rich by making mortgages cheap; now that a few of them have gotten rich by betting that mortgages would be priced rationally again, folks are upset.

It goes a lot deeper than that. Short selling is actually ruining the ability of financial institutions that aren't even exposed to the mortgage problems (or are minimally so) to get the inflow of credit they need. Or so the argument goes.

Again, I'm not an economist, so I don't have a strong opinion here. What I do know is that people who know a hell of a lot more than me (or probably anyone who posts here) are making these decisions, so dismissing them based on some generalized knowledge (i.e. short selling is bad because my econ 101 textbook said so) seems childish.

That's why I was asking the original commenter if, perhaps, he knew enough about economics to have an informed opinion. For all I know, he has a PhD in it.

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