The Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday night announced that it was extending some of the temporary short-selling restrictions it had put into place in mid-September.
Facing the imminent expiration of those measures on Thursday, the SEC issued the extension “to allow time for completion of work on the anticipated passage of legislation,” it said in a statement.
The emergency, temporary orders include the prohibition of short selling in financial companies, a requirement that institutional money managers report to the SEC their new short sales of certain publicly traded securities and the easing of restrictions on the ability of securities issuers to repurchase their securities.
A short sale is a bet that a stock will go down in price. Short selling has been criticized lately as a means for attacking stocks, in particular the shares of financial companies, which have been vulnerable of late.
The SEC’s statement did stress that short selling wasn’t inherently fraudulent or malicious. “Short selling plays an important role in the market for a variety of reasons,” it noted, “including contributing to efficient price discovery, mitigating market bubbles, increasing market liquidity, promoting capital formation, facilitating and hedging risk-management activities, and importantly, limiting upward market manipulations.”
Earlier on Wednesday, New York Stock Exchange (NYX) head Duncan Niederauer said on a conference call that the “uptick rule…is back on the table” as well. That rule, which was eliminated last year, forced short selling to occur on an uptick, or a transaction executed at a higher price than a previous transaction in the security.
The uptick rule, which had been implemented to stop traders from driving down stock prices through heavy short selling and then picking up the shares for a big profit, has some heavyweight proponents, such as Muriel Siebert and Ted Weisberg.
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