Personally, in hindsight, I think the better course of action would have been to raise the margin requirement on those holdings to 100%. However, I imagine the

Personally, in hindsight, I think the better course of action would have been to raise the margin requirement on those holdings to 100%. However, I imagine the SEC requires notice of more than overnight on such action which is probably why they have simply stopped trading those issues. The failure on the brokers then was in not gradually raising the margin requirements the past two weeks when it became obvious that this was a volatility disaster in the making. The failure of the regulators was, if correct, allowing shorts to be > 100% of the float. They were asleep and should have had a hammer on any dealers who were lending fictious shares.