Quote Originally Posted by Dayuhan View Post
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.
You're putting short selling and other potential financial weapons in a box that is completely removed from the state of the markets and the prevailing market culture. Yes, such tactics won't work against otherwise healthy companies. The problem is that there are fewer and fewer otherwise healthy companies, and naked short selling and other forms of uncovered risk are a big part of the reason why. Your position is akin to saying guns wouldn't be a problem if everyone would just stop shooting each other.