Short-sellers are endangered. That is bad news for markets

If you want to be liked, don’t be a short-seller. Some other investors might defend you, at least in the abstract, as an important part of a healthy and efficient market. But to most you are—at best—a ghoul who profits from the misfortune of others. At worst, you are a corporate raider who bets that honest firms will go bust and then spreads lies about them until they do. Even your defenders will melt away if you pick the wrong target (shares they own) or the wrong moment (a crash in which many are losing money but you are making it).Since the authorities are often among these fair-weather friends, the list of historical short-selling bans is long. It features 17th-century Dutch regulators, 18th-century British ones and Napoleon Bonaparte. The latest addition, issued on November 6th, came from South Korea’s Financial Services Commission. It has caught the zeitgeist well, and not just among the army of local retail investors who blame shorts for a soggy domestic stockmarket. Wall Street’s “meme stock” craze also cast amateur traders as the heroic underdogs, pitted against villainous short-selling professionals.