Does the SEC have the authority to stop the practice of selling short? Is it illegal?
The SEC does have the authority to enforce *existing* rules about naked short selling which for whatever reason, it didn’t do until today.
They can ban all short selling. Based on the experiences of third world exchanges that have done so, one would expect volatility to increase by 500% and volume to decrease by 75%. Is that what you want?
SEC has plenty of authority.....just open a few of these litigation releases and scan them......
http://www.sec.gov/litigation/litreleases.shtml