South Korea Rehash

I posted this on Friday, but it didn't get the attention it deserved. So here we are again:

I see that South Korea’s government is considering a number of things to bail out their doe-eyed bulls:

This kind of thing pisses me off more than I can express. Bulls are, as I’ve said countless times, the ultimate welfare queens. They are weak, sniveling, amoral cowards whose only demand from life is that the market go up every damn (which is precisely why our failed country is $40 trillion in debt). But the United States is clearly not unique in its wet-nursing of equity bulls.

Let’s look at each of these

• National Funds – cash taken from taxpayers to bail out traders. Great. Just great. This is like how the U.S. is sucking its strategic petroleum reserve dry in order to keep prices from being higher than they already are. It’s just using public funds for political purposes. Shameless.

• Short-Selling Ban – How about a stock BUYING ban? I mean, let’s be fair! This has been tried countless time throughout the ages, and it is usually a sign that the market is totally screwed. I will remember to my dying day that in September 2008 the SEC banned shorting financial stocks in the U.S. That act caused the market to rally for about 30 minutes before all holy hell broke loose.

• Limited Leveraged ETFs – This one doesn’t bug me quite as much as the rest, although it still offends my libertarian instincts, since – – well – – if the public wants these financial products, let them have them! Just allow them to hang themselves with their own rope, is all I ask.

• Brokerage Margin Requirements – This probably pisses me off the least, because I can understand how a brokerage might want to, for its own sake, not extend tons of credit to the gambling addicts known as humans.

• Share Buyback Rules – Yeah, you know how I feel about this one. Corporate buybacks should be illegal. Period. Not a single share. It USED to be illegal, you know, because a company gobbling up its own stock is an obvious ploy to goose the price for the sake of the C-suite executives who want to maximize the profits from their stock options.

Anyway, I suspect semiconductors (and South Korea) are MILES away from a bottom, but in the meanwhile, I’m sure the government will try some of the stupid-ass gimmicks above, since 99.9999% of the public are permabulls and need to be mollycoddled during their times of trouble.

Wimps.