Short Selling

Listening to the BBC's coverage of the unfolding financial crisis, they appear to have become obsessed with short-selling. They are helped in that by idiots like Vince Cable, who is fast becoming the most over-rated politician since Gordon Brown (whom the BBC and much of the left also used to think knew something about finance - until they found out otherwise). But short-sellers are not creating the crisis. Indeed, anyone who was shorting HBOS as the price collapsed in the last couple of days will have taken a beating, as the shares are now above 200p again. No one at the BBC seems to understand this. As for calls to clamp down on short-selling, that isn't so much shooting the messeneger, as deciding to suffocate the messenger under lots of pointless red-tape. It is completely irrelevant.