The "man on the street" doesn't always get it.
The average "man on the street" tends not to be very savvy when it comes to finance.
People like Byrne and the promoters of multiple pump and dump, penny stocks have taken advantage of this investor naivete to unload an ungodly amount of over-inflated, and in many cases worthless, common stocks.
There is no law against "naked short selling", at least not in the United States. There are SRO's that ban it in certain venues, but there are other venues where naked short selling is an absolute necessity for an orderly market. For every purchaser of a futures contract, whether it's for a commodity, a basket of stocks, Treasury securities, or single stock futures contract, someone must be on the other side of that trade. In many instances, the short side of that contract will be someone who's hedging their future production/access to the underlying asset. But in many cases, the short side of the contract is naked.
Even "legitimate" short selling bewilders many people. The idea of selling something first, then buying it later to secure a capital gain often sounds wrong to the "man on the street". But just because the "man on the street" doesn't grasp the nuances of securities analysis and management doesn't mean there's anything with our laws or our markets.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
