Could we make up our minds, please?

Seriously. Pardon my French, but WTF?

All of a sudden, now, it's "wrong" to bet against something in the market? This information might have come in very handy about nine years ago, when Enron went under.

(What is she talking about? We thought she was some sort of bleeding-heart, tree-hugging liberal.)

HA!

Here's the thing, and I'll try to be brief, because--for real--I'm sleepy.

The SEC has filed suit against Goldman Sachs, because the company sold mortgage-backed securities to investors and then bet against them, istelf. It shorted. (For crying out loud, if you know anyone who hasn't read WHOSS, beat them with a stick--a small one--and tell them how continually relevant it is).

Let me make it perfectly clear that ANYONE IN THE WORLD was also welcome to bet against those same securities. Anyone who understood them. And for those of us (myself included here) who didn't understand the nuances of those financial instruments, we should have avoided them like the plague. We should not go long. We should not go short. We should not take the risk. We should not try that sport.

Back to my rant. The original one, that is. Years ago, a certain stock analyst named Jim Chanos short-sold--and encouraged a select group of investors to short-sell--a stock with the ticker symbol ENE.

No, it's not a perfect parallel, and I'm the first to make note of that. But I'm also the first to note that, by the time these "complicated financial matters" get watered down enough for public consumption, the message from the Goldman debacle will be as follows:

"Goldman Shorted Own Products; Made Billions While Investors Bore Brunt"

Hey, that's not bad. Perhaps I have a future in writing or something.

All I'm saying is, nobody had a problem with short-selling back in 2001, when it generated a major run on the bank at Enron. But now it's bad. (Don't believe that's what happened? Search "Chanos" in this article.)

Good versus evil. Wrong versus right. Short versus long.

It's never, ever, ever that simple.

Ever.