The Politics of GameStop

Let me first establish my bona fides. Here’s an excerpt from an article I posted on financial site Seeking Alpha more than ten years ago:

The time has come to ban all naked short-side derivatives. The only way to take a net short position on an asset should be traditional short selling. Everything else creates too much moral hazard.

Some short sellers are scumbags. They short stocks then publish hit pieces about them, driving the price down, where the shorts can cover. There’s nothing wrong with what these noisy shorts do in principle. If a stock is terrible…