First we'll kill all the short sellers

There is a bunch of nonsense out there about how the end-of-week stock market rally demonstrates that the SEC's strategy of banning short sales on financial stocks was a success.

Total nonsense.

An equivalently good strategy would have been to force all Americans with last names beginning with the letter F to buy financial stocks.  The market would go up, that's what markets do when people buy stock, whether willingly or under duress.  It doesn't prove that it's a good strategy to force certain individuals to buy stocks.

This is the madness of the current political season.  Stocks are meant to go up.  If stocks go down, we must change the rules of our financial system until they go up again.

Though there is one country that has figured out how to stop their stock market from ever falling...