What you are saying is that Cox was criticized for banning short selling on certain companies. Criticized for doing too much.
Before Cox's action McCain blamed everybody else and wanted to fire Cox for having been "asleep at the switch". Doing nothing, not too much.
It's not difficult to prove that most of these problems can be traced back to deregulation championed by McCain and his good friend Gramm. Now
he's getting desperate and blames everybody else.
I'm going to vote for Obama and want to be held responsible for what happens if he becomes president. By the same token, anybody voting for
McCain should be ready to assume responsibility for what he's going to do if elected.
I just posted excerpts of the WALL STREET JOURNAL editorial. Here is
some more:
[Take "naked" shorting, in which an investor sells a stock short -- betting that it will fall in price -- without first borrowing the
shares he is selling from an investor who owns them. The SEC has never condoned the practice, and since 2005 it has clamped down on short
selling in any stock that shows evidence of naked shorting. The SEC further tightened its rules against naked shorting just hours before
Mr. McCain excoriated Mr. Cox for doing nothing. The rules announced Wednesday will increase penalties and close loopholes that exempted
broker-dealers from the rules against naked shorting. They also make it clear that deliberately selling short a stock whose shares cannot
be borrowed is fraud under the Securities Exchange Act. That's all to the good, we suppose; fraud is fraud. But regular short selling is not
fraud. It adds valuable information to the market about what investors believe to be the price direction of a stock. Demonizing short-sellers
as a band of criminals, or barring short-selling outright in financial stocks, as regulators in the U.K. did Thursday, removes information
from the market. Then there's Mr. McCain's tirade against the "uptick rule," a Depression-era chestnut that investors could only short stock
after a rise in that stock's price. The SEC staff studied the effect of the uptick rule on prices for years, in a controlled experiment
involving thousands of stocks. It found the rule had no effect. Other studies, including those that examined the uptick rule's effect on
stocks disclosing bad news, also found that it "protected" no one. The SEC's permanent staff has long supported repeal and the SEC's commissioners voted to do so unanimously in June 2007. While he was at it, Mr. McCain added the wholly unsupported assertion that "speculators pounded the shares of even good companies into the
ground." It wasn't very long ago that he blamed speculators on the long side for sky-high oil prices. Then oil prices fell. Now Mr.
McCain wants voters to believe speculators are responsible for driving mismanaged financial companies to ruin. The irony is that this
critique puts Mr. McCain in the same camp as some of the Wall Street CEOs who have led their firms so poorly. They also want someone (else)
to blame. In case Mr. McCain is interested, overall short interest in financial companies actually declined by 20% between July and the end
of August. That's right: Far from driving this crisis, shorts were net buyers of financial stocks this summer, as they must buy stocks back
to close their positions and realize their gains (or losses). In a crisis, voters want steady, calm leadership, not easy, misleading
answers that will do nothing to help. Mr. McCain is sounding like a candidate searching for a political foil rather than a genuine
solution].
http://online.wsj.co...days_us_opinion
