Pardon this unedited mess but for the answer to your question I highly recommend listening to Bud Burrell who appeared in hour Two of this past weekend's FinancialSense news broadcast.

Mr Burrell mentioned that SEC has *never* prosecuted a single entity for naked shorting so why should they stop shorting now? If you could hold up a bank and be assured the cops wouldn't come, it would be a freeforall as criminals swoop down like vultures to clean out the banks. Likewise the criminal Hedge Funds are cleaning up without any fear of penalty of any kind, so who's to blame them for taking the world to the cleaners?

Also noteworthy is the fact that Offshore Hedgies are outside the legal reach of the SEC anyways. Most recent evidence of this flagrant flaunting of the law is that Hedgies continued to naked short sell US financials during the period (eg. Fannie and Freddie) when there was an imposed moritorium on short selling of financials.

Bud estimates the gangsters in collusion with Major Banks, have swindled the US alone out of TEN TRILLION DOLLARS in a market the size of 17 Trillion. The regulators & bankers don't care and have blocked every effort to probe into this criminal laundering of the hard won savings of millions of North Americans. Like he, Puplava & Sinclair have stated, markets must be allowed to settle on it's own volition or the whole gig is up. Until then, regulators will ignore the standard "ten o'clock takedown" of Gold & Silver on the CRIMEX. I fear that at the end of the day most companies that survive might have to go private and or form an alliance where they only sell metal at prices settled for physical in a cash market.