No, my claim was that the following would put you in jail: (1) shorting markets and then (2) deliberately creating the sort of fluctuation we saw in the last we

No, my claim was that the following would put you in jail: (1) shorting markets and then (2) deliberately creating the sort of fluctuation we saw in the last week. That's all I was commenting on in this thread. (Selling "insurance" and it was wrongly labelled above wouldn't be profitable even if there weren't jail problems. The sell side loses money on a CDS when the market goes down. You'd want to buy CDSs for that eventuality, and CDSs are not insurance.)