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AmSpecBlog
Re: McCain Has Lost His Mind
It's also difficult to prove exactly how big a problem naked short selling is, and how much it played into our current economic problems. I'm not saying that it isn't a bad thing. I'm just saying that I've never seen a convincing case that it has widespread, terrible effects. Usually the arguments I've seen are offered by some guy whose publicly-traded company started failing, and started to see their stocks getting shorted (which is perfectly legitimate). We can't blame all of this on phantom trading.
UPDATE: Then I run across Andrew Cuomo's promise to "probe" short selling, and I'm reminded of Ted Frank's piece on prosecutorial zeal in our July/August issue. Every phone call from every hedge fund is going to get scrutinized, all because politically ambitious prosecutors have got to "do something."
J. Peter Freire is contributing editor of The American Spectator. Freire first came to the Spectator as an intern and editorial assistant under a journalism fellowship from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. Since then, he has written for the New York Times, Reason, and Human Events. Prior to returning to The American Spectator, he was editor of Brainwash, an online journal of opinion from America's Future Foundation, worked for the Evans-Novak Political Report, and researched and wrote for the New York Times. Freire studied English Renaissance literature and political science at Cornell University, where he served as senior editor and columnist at the Cornell Review. He is also a 2008 Phillips Foundation Journalism Fellow and the CPAC 2009 Journalist of the Year.
You can reach his Twitter page by clicking here, or follow him @JPFreire.