Quote Originally Posted by motorfirebox View Post
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.
Not saying that at all, I'm saying that short selling is NOT a reason why companies are unhealthy, it's a phenomenon that emerges when there are many fundamentally unsound and overvalued companies around, and people start taking advantage of that. The short sellers are a symptom of the unhealthiness, not a cause. When a herd of buffalo is sick and hungry the vultures and jackals will gather, but the vultures and jackals aren't the reason why the herd is dying off.

I wouldn't agree that there are fewer and fewer healthy companies around. A lot of the unhealthy ones are gone; whatever they had going that was productive has been absorbed by better-run competitors. That's what recessions are supposed to do, and one of the reasons the recent recession was so bad was that the 2001-2002 recession was countered too effectively, before it could do what needed to be done after the absurdly inflated bubble years of the late 90s. The herd needs to be culled now and then, lest the sick multiply and infect the healthy.