IMHO why the fuck is shorting legal to begin with. Short insurance should be mandatory for short trading.
Obviously false: https://secsearch.sec.gov/search/docs?utf8=%E2%9C%93&affilia...
> 4chan and several other sites...
Scale dictates enforcement priorities, obviously. Like a lot of people, they don't deal with issues until they are large and impact the market. They are ABSOLUTELY going to intervene here. First with some immediate action, and later they'll craft a new rule to guide social media on stock advice being not allowed on their platforms (IMO).
> why the f** is shorting legal
Short selling rewards investors who believe that certain stocks are overvalued or that the company is covering up fraud. They helped bring Lehman Brothers down, as well as Enron, Wirecard, etc... In those instances, the shorts were instrumental in reverting stocks down to correct (sometimes zero) prices. Without them, bubbles would rise higher and poop much bigger. That sort of volatility destroys liquidity and confidence in the market.
> Short insurance should be mandatory for short trading.
There are naked short limits already, but yeah, this issue with GameStop should have those rules re-evaluated, because they obviously didn't work in this case.
Please don't fix this, it's perfect.
I wouldn't be so certain about this at all. Matt Levine has a good take on it: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2021-01-26/will-w...
What about Section 230?
I know the IRS is different from the SEC, Apples to Oranges. But like you said, they've neglected insider trading; it's probably for very similar reasons, because those being investigated just have too much power to take down. I'm sure the SEC will hammer these easy targets on WSB well before they even dare touch the Big Boys.
[1]https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/03/sunday-review/tax-rich-ir...
[2]https://www.propublica.org/article/earned-income-tax-credit-...
> January 2016 through the end of the SEC fiscal year on September 30, 2017
If you look at the followup data, you can see both administrations are similar...
https://www.law.nyu.edu/sites/default/files/Fig3-SEEDNov2020...
...and then if you actually read my above link, you'd see numerous Insider Trading prosecutions (which was the original false claim made above).
source: https://www.npr.org/2020/08/14/901862355/under-trump-sec-enf...
There are many [1].
[1] https://secsearch.sec.gov/search/docs?utf8=%E2%9C%93&affilia...