April 20, 2022
Please remove this proposed rule. It is yet another example of large players in the financial markets using their power and influence to protect themselves from their own bad bets.
This rule essentially would allow hedge funds and the like that short a stock, even through the illegal means of naked shorts, to have access to an infinite number of shares to cover their fail-to-delivers without paying the fair market price for those shares on the open market.
Rules like this have been proposed and reject in the past and for good reason. They give an unfair advantage to those that work to crush American businesses through aggressive and, in some cases, illegal methods of shorting by eliminating their risk of unlimited losses.
Part of what sets the US Financial Markets apart from the rest of the world is the idea that our markets are fair and free. Even the suggestion of rules like this void that idea.
If someone shorts a stock and that stock rebounds, resulting in the short sellers to close their positions, whether by margin call or otherwise, those short sellers need to pay what the market demands. Anything less is a violation of everything the United States stands for.
Please remove this proposal swiftly and restrict any similar rules in the future from being proposed.