May 22, 2009
Dear SEC:
I am in favor of a permanent, industry wide uptick rule. For a period of 2008 and into early 2009, "news media" began diseminating extremely adverse reports of financial stocks. Many of these "reports" appear to be not accurate.
Nevertheless, large declines in the price of financial stocks occurred and they lost access to capital markets. Investors lost many billions of dollars and fled these securities. A major crises occurred and the United States Government had to intervene and provide capital to save our financial system.
I think that if we had a uptick rule, the "adverse reports" would not have appeared in the news media as some of the short sellers who may have supplied a lot of this misinformation would not have had an economic incentive to do so.
I very strongly agree with Jim Kramer about the urgent need for an industry wide, permanent uptick rule.