cdu shorting activity, page-344

"During the GFC, markets world-wide banned the practice of shorting, in their own words (more or less) ” to ensure a fair and orderly market...”

The inference here of course is that shorting, by and large, must be detrimental to “fair and orderly markets”...else why the need to ban it?
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I remember that period. The short selling ban was first implemented for the banks I believe - because short selling bank stocks may cause depositors to lose confidence in the bank, causing them to withdraw their money from the bank and in effect creating a crisis of confidence for the bank.

This was later extended to encompass financial firms in general. The justification was that no one knew how deep the GFC went and it was a precaution that seemed prudent.

Now that the worst of the GFC is behind us, it turns out banning the short selling of financial firms hasn't helped. Babcock and Brown, Allco, still went bust. I remember reading expert commentary questioning the wisdom of extending the short selling ban across the entire financial services sector.

In any event this is all moot for CDU as CDU is not a financial firm- their ability to exist does not depend on customers maintaining confidence of their financial standing, and secondly we are no longer in the GFC where there was a real element of uncertainty in the markets.

I think if T4P did a bit more research on this topic, he'll see his original inference is not accurate.