people's willingness to believe things that are too good to be true and look closely when everything is working and everything is making you money gets eroded in a bull market.

I'm Bethany McLean. Did you ever have a moment of doubt about capitalism and whether greed's a good idea?

And I'm Luigi Zengalis. We have socialism for the very rich, rugged individualism for the poor.

And this is Capital Isn't, a podcast about what is working in capitalism.

First of all, tell me, is there some society you know that doesn't run on greed?

And most importantly, what isn't?

We ought to do better by the people that get left behind.

I don't think we should have killed the capital system in the process.

So Luigi, did you know that in 1609, a merchant contracted to sell shares in the Dutch East India Company in the future?

That sent the company's share price into a plunge.

A year later, the authorities imposed what people

think is the world's first ban on short selling. Actually, I did not know, but I'm not that

surprised because authorities don't like short sellers. And they have been blamed for every financial

crisis since the Dutch episode. During the US stock market crash of 1999, President Hoover actually condemned short selling in 1932. During the 2008

financial crisis, we have seen bans on short sales. We've seen CEOs of big Wall Street

firms blobbing to have bans of short sales. One declaration that I love is that short-selling

is an American, without clear why, but it's just an indication of how much these people are

hated. It's probably worth spelling out what short-sellers do, for those of you who aren't

versed in the intricacies of finance. Short-sell sellers borrow shares from a broker and sell them in the

market in anticipation that the price will fall. They then, if it works out, buy the shares back at

the lower price, returning them to the broker and they make a profit on the decline in the stock

price. The argument is that show selling creates a downward pressure on stock prices

...