THE corporate regulator has widened a split between Australia's banks and the rest of the finance sector after extending its ban on the short selling of financial stocks.

The ban's detractors called on the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, headed by Tony D'Aloisio, to clarify what it has learnt since it imposed the ban six months ago, why it has decided to keep it, and what needs to happen for it to be lifted.

The regulator extended the ban yesterday to the end of May. It was first imposed in September. A ban on short selling companies with no links to the finance industry has already been lifted.

ASIC said it was pursuing a "cautious approach" amid "potential damage from aggressive or predatory practices" in volatile markets. It had conducted "extensive research and analysis" before making its decision.

But the chief executive of the Investment and Financial Services Association, Richard Gilbert, drew attention to the vagueness of ASIC's statement.

"What the finance industry needs is some clear guidelines about what conditions [ASIC] would need in order to lift the ban," Mr Gilbert said.

Australia is one of a number of smaller markets - including Italy and the Netherlands - to retain a ban on short selling. The practice involves investors borrowing shares, selling them, and hoping to buy them back at a lower price and pocket the difference.

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Short selling: one way to rob a bank's shareholders, create mayhem, aggravate a financial crisis and get away with it, legally so far... except for a ban on the process till due notice.

see toon at top.

Slump Humbling Blue-Chip Stocks, Once Dow’s Pride

The banking giant Citigroup commanded a stock price of $55 just two years ago. But at one point Thursday, as markets hurtled to their lowest close in 12 years, the shares were worth less than an item at the Dollar Store.

After months of breathtaking declines, this is what Wall Street has come to: Blue-chip companies, once considered safe investments and cornerstones of the economy, are akin to penny stocks.

The bear market is tightening its grip, despite efforts by the government to support the economy and some of its biggest companies. Fears about the depth and breadth of the recession drove the Dow Jones industrial average down another 4 percent on Thursday, bringing its losses so far this year to 25 percent — just shy of the 33 percent decline recorded for all of 2008.

“It borders on unbelievable,” said Glenn W. Tyranski, senior vice president for financial compliance at NYSE Regulation. “You’re seeing companies that are just really suffering across the board.”

The number of companies trading at $10 or less on the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index has increased tenfold since the market reached a peak in October 2007. And with no end in sight to the downward spiral, the New York Stock Exchange has temporarily suspended its $1 minimum share-price requirements to prevent a wave of delistings.

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What has gone wrong? Probably some derivative bets went against the bank and... pow! catastrophe... investors are bleeding to death...

Spread of ancient art is a good thing

Phillip Adams | April 11, 2009
Article from:  The Australian
....

I’m talking about the art regarded as looted – the paintings stolen or bought under duress from Nazi Germany’s Jewish families, and the mountains of ancient art souvenired by triumphant army generals, a venerable tradition honoured, if that’s the word, as late as the Six-Day War. General Moshe Dayan’s “private” collection, gathered in the heat of battle, now resides in an Israeli museum.
...

Yet the greatest threats aren’t the foreigners but the locals. No sooner was a dead pharaoh plonked in his pyramid than the tomb was looted. Often by his successor.
...
There are times when the collectors and the museums are the saviours, protecting the past like zoos breeding endangered species. At an early meeting of the Australia Council I proposed a plan that would limit looting and help poor countries with rich pasts while cutting Sotheby’s and Christie’s out of the picture.
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Gus Leonisky:

Dear Phillip

Most people know where you coming from. You are a collector of antiquity. And that's commendable to your chosen ideals, which you try to justify in your column (see above link)... Please don't. We all try to justify one way or another the purpose of our personal indulgence. I do this every day, on many fronts. We all do it privately, but it's often loaded with self-serving double dipping... Doing it publicly seems hypocritical...

Yes, on this subject of antique collectibles there is always a fine line between looting and acquiring. I remember this affable dealer once in Yourp (Europe) who had more than two tonnes of roman coinage in two large antique cast-iron tubs. He also had a massive collection of prehistoric arrow heads and axes... I had no idea where all this came from... No questions asked.

But no, collecting is not like zoos where we 'protect" endangered species with breeding programmes. Sure, on one side we protect a few individuals of a species and encourage them to breed while on the other side we are hell-bent on destroying their specific precious homes (habitats). They would not be in the zoos' breeding programs had we not interfered with their space. Some zoos and some species are able to be successful in such ventures, but success is rare as territory and species always go hand in hand.

We are killing nature in the name of progress.
We are robbing tombs in the name of knowledge.

Zoos are pathetic places for species to live and breed in, even with our utmost caring and replicating of a landscape, to a point. Gees..., there is this series on ABC2 at present called "Zoo" coming from the UK. There are fantastic carers, vets and other human creatures fussing about stuff, including nutrition. But a concrete floor in a windowless grubby shed divided with fences designed to arrest Sherman tanks is not a place for a female elephant to give birth in. Would you breed in an environment like this? I would not. I'd shoot myself. But the animals are not provided with the means to do so. They live in prison and with forlorn demeanor they appear to know that... A "zoo" like the Western Plain Zoo, in New South Wales, Australia, is closer to the mark by giving some species more acreage to move about, but the hunt and the purpose of being is still muddled by human "systems" of interference. In the English Zoo, species like elephants are aired for a few hours daily and their horizon expands to the boundary of the concrete jungle of the monkeys. No wonder some chimps at a zoo in Sweden collect stones, before the visitors pour in, to throw angrily at the suited great apes who pay money to gawk at them. Would you not?

Because in the long and short term, it is only because of our vicarious pleasure and our guilt at our expansionist destruction that we have zoos. Same with collecting, the best place for the items is to be left alone underground as you say but then why leave it to the pharaoh successor to loot the place when we can do it "legally"?

Yes, who owns the treasures of the planet? A question that has always been at the centre of war, at the tall fence building and wanton destruction...

see toon at top.

The US state of California has returned three Renaissance paintings that were confiscated from Jewish art dealers in Nazi Germany during the 1930s.

The 16th-Century paintings were returned to the heirs of their former owners, Jakob and Rosa Oppenheimer, who died during the Holocaust.

After World War II, the paintings ended up in the collection of US newspaper tycoon, William Randolph Hearst.

They have been on display at a California museum for over 30 years

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