This is a brilliant post

Graphs like this is why they invented a semi-log scale.

It seems there is a fairly wide consensus toward the view you are expressing. Yet realizing there's an extreme "free market" ideology permeating Washington political thinking ... and believing that, although those in leadership positions often do their best to appear the biggest idiots on the face of the earth, some have been keenly aware what lied in store once leverage built up around a massively inflated real estate market began to unwind ... and so, the need to create "free market" sources of easily manufactured capital is what led to the end of the uptick rule. By making it easier to drive a stock's price down and creating a self-perpetuating feedback loop, an otherwise modestly rigged game has become grotesquely so, allowing massive amounts of capital to be effectively stolen from retirement savers, widows and the elderly. This is the "free market" the President defends when he rails against "protectionism."

"Free market" is as phony as "equality for all Communism" The only thing that exists is tinkering between anarchy and rules.

The stock mkt went down just as fast when shorting was banned! Stocks are cheap right now because corp. debt is even cheaper. The corp debt and derivatives mkt is 800lbs gorilla in this crisis and is COMPLETLY UNREGULATED AND OPAQUE.

This is the least intelligent post I have ever seen on this blog!

Was just a coincidence? Idk?

cox should be fired. 1> they failed to regulate CDO/CDS market 2> they failed to limit leverage and margin control. 3> they let short do whatever they want to ruin people's retirement plan. now stock market is in chaos. how you explain those people at their 40, 50, or near retirement do now? extreme leverage and short should be banned, cuz we are talking about people's retirement.

It's always the evil short seller, right? Even if he loses.Some weeks ago the short sellers were blamed for skyrocketing the stock price of Volkswagen to 1000 Euros here in Germany during the mother of all short squeezes.

Couple questions: How well did the uptick rule perform in 1987 (more rapid crash) and the 2000-2003 crash? How effective, really, is the uptick rule when a tick is equal to a penny? I mean thick about it. Even during rapid selling, it would seem that you get plenty of 1-penny upticks along the way down to establish a short position. I have never shorted a stock (although I have been long inverse ETFs), but in these days of electronic trading, it would seem pretty easy to short with the uptick rule.