could quite easily be exploited by any foreign entity desiring to do harm to the U.S. economy. The only dispute is whether such a desire exists.
The beauty of economic interdependence is that at least on the level of national actors, nobody has much incentive to target the US economy... they'd do themselves far more harm than good.

I've said this before, but it bears repeating: short sellers are jackals, not lions. They prey on the weak, the bloated, and the dying. If the underlying equity or commodity is fairly valued and supported by reasonably strong fundamentals, short sellers can't cause anything more serious than a transient downward blip. Anything brought down by short sellers was dead on its feet to start with, and you could argue that short sellers do the markets a favor by perforating bloat before it gets any bigger.

It doesn't take an abacus to figure that gold and silver are way out on a limb at today's prices. It doesn't take an abacus to figure that any positive economic news is likely to pull money out of precious metals and into equities and real estate, reducing support levels and depressing prices. Obviously short sellers are going to exploit this... but really, who cares? If the price of gold knocks back to $500/oz, how does that hurt the US economy? Sure, it sucks if you're carrying a long position in gold, but anyone carrying a long position in gold in what could turn out to be the opening stages of a recovery cycle is cruisin' for a bruisin' anyway. If you're betting on a double dip recession holding gold might make sense, but if the dip don't dip you're likely to take it where it hurts... this is the nature of the game.

Short sellers make admirable scapegoats, and people who buy late into a bubble and watch their money take a dive are often inclined to look for scapegoats. Good to remember, though, that even if you see a dead elephant on the savannah with a bunch of jackals chowing down, that doesn't mean it was the jackals that killed the elephant.

Yes, some short selling crosses the line into fraud, and it needs to be controlled more effectively... but I don't see it as the existential crisis that some make it out to be.