I didn't mean to imply that you were anti-regulation, nor did I intend to come across as attacking your call to transparency - I just disagree with your stance

I didn't mean to imply that you were anti-regulation, nor did I intend to come across as attacking your call to transparency - I just disagree with your stance on shorts. No doubt I elaborated a bit too much on the implications of this, but in a concrete, real sense, short positions in the market helped to drive the bubble higher than it would otherwise go. Eventually those positions did "pop" the bubble and bring prices down. AIG was the company sitting on the other side of a lot of those short positions when they finally popped the bubble. Most of my understanding of how these short positions drove the bubble comes from articles like this propublica report: http://www.propublica.org/feature/the-magnetar-trade-how-one-hedge-fund-helped-keep-the-housing-bubble-going http://www.propublica.org/feature/the-magnetar-trade-how-one.... Any explanation I'd give would just be a summarization of what I've picked up there. I found the case pretty compelling.