UK Regulators Still Hating On The Shorts

You’d think that if we’ve learned anything from the past few waves of financial crisis, we’d have learned that shorts sellers play an important role in financial markets.

Shorts can check otherwise unbridled financial enthusiasm, improve price discovery and have often pointed out accounting chicanery at powerful public companies. Shareholders and management are incentivized to overlook or cover-up problems. They want stocks to go up. Regulators often lack institutional incentives to investigate wrong-doing.

But shorts, like John Paulson of Paulson & Company or Jim Chanos of Kynikos Associates, can make fortunes by uncovering hidden problems. In short (sorry), they are providing the market with a valuable service–let’s call them positive externalities–all while pursuing profit.

Nonetheless, we haven’t learned this lesson at all. Today the Financial Times reported that the UK securities regulator, the FSA, is going to impose new disclosure rules on short sellers who take positions on the shares of companies undertaking new share issuances.

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