We've gone over all these details, time and time again in the past, so I won't re-hash the old stuff, but...
The fees to obtain your certificates (in Canada at least) went up dramatically a few years ago...I presume because lots of folks were following Jim's advice.
If I were a broker, and someone wanted to pay me for the use of someone else's shares for a while, and those shares were in registered accounts, or cash, or margin, or whatever....I'd simply "temporarily" swap them for my credit note, into my pool, and there they are, ready for shorting. If the owner decides to sell, no problem, as I the broker would either swap them back with the push of a key, or short that sale myself, creating a zero sum event, where I now own the shares loaned to the original shorter. And again, if I were the broker, I am sure I could come up with any number of creative, quasi-legal methods to supply the shorts. And what about naked shorting? What regulator gives a damn about that, unless it's YOU who try it?
It's my opinion that we can't stop these scum from leeching off of us, until we can cause the regulators to actually do their job, which we are already paying them to do.
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