Where's my shorts?

Short selling. The practice of selling a security that you don't own, borrowing it to cover your position, and then hoping to either buy it back for less than you paid or, in the best situation, the company goes bust, you return the shares you borrowed and trouser the sale of shares that never were yours.

Even in the good times of a bull run, this is a morally dodgy practice. I agree that it helps drive out issues with a company, it allows the investment industry to focus on the underlying performance of the shares rather than holding them in the hope they'll be ok. Yet I can't help but feel that the ability to sell something you don't own and make a profit of it is wrong.

Of course, borrowing from an argument the good Robert Peston at the BBC used, there's the interesting moral dilemma that those encouraging the practice were the ones doing the most bleating when the practice started to hurt their businesses.

In the current turbulence, the short sellers returned with a vengeance, intent on driving down stocks and making money. But there's more to it than that. Ordinary share holders want to sell out of their positions. They've seen companies like Bear Stearns and Lehman go bust and people have lost all their money. In the UK, other banks nationalised and the savers who were given shares in them have lost all the money they were given. Perhaps none of the "value" was real but these people felt rich, they felt like they had some money put aside for a rainy day. Now most of them have nothing. As the market fall, others feel it might be best to get some real money out while they can.

Don't blame the shorts for the trouble the banks are in, they're just doing what the markets allow them to do. If you're looking for culprits in this bonfire of the insanities, you should like to the men in sharp suits.