The obstacle is not the difficulty of refutation - it is very easy - but the volume of refutable material. It would just take too much time, and since nobody's takimng it seriously anyway, why bother? If someone would pay me as much to refute it as the poor oblivious American taxpayer paid to have it written, I'll gladly take the job.
That would be a valid point if stock manipulation had the ability to significantly depress the stock price of an otherwise healthy company for an extended period of time. I see no reason to believe that they can, or that it's been tried. A brief dip in the stock price will not significantly impair fundraising or disrupt management.
Short selling doesn't drive healthy companies out of business... the art of short selling is to identify and target the walking dead. Of course if there's a lot of walking dead out there that can cause problems, but the source of the problems isn't the short selling, it's the prevalence of walking deadness. If short selling seems to be causing major disruption the chances are the short selling itself is just a symptom of a much deeper systemic problem. The answer isn't t try and ban short selling, it's to try and prevent companies from getting into the kind of condition that will allow them to be damaged by short selling.
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