What’s striking is how public they were: they didn’t hide their insights, or the facts underlying their reasoning, in the slightest. They were yelling and screaming!
It's actually not all that striking, when you think about it. Shorts can only make money if the rest of the world comes around to their way of thinking. You can lose a ton of money going short at the wrong point even if you are ultimately completely correct about the asset being shorted. Thus shorts are often blamed for inducing price declines; you might remember that there was, ludicrously, a short-term *ban* on shorting certain financial stocks right at the height of the crisis.
None of this justifies any of the shenanigans, but it does help explain, to a certain point, why people didn't necessarily believe the shorts: their self-interest would induce the shorts to talk the end of the world regardless.
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It's actually not all that striking, when you think about it. Shorts can only make money if the rest of the world comes around to their way of thinking. You can lose a ton of money going short at the wrong point even if you are ultimately completely correct about the asset being shorted. Thus shorts are often blamed for inducing price declines; you might remember that there was, ludicrously, a short-term *ban* on shorting certain financial stocks right at the height of the crisis.
None of this justifies any of the shenanigans, but it does help explain, to a certain point, why people didn't necessarily believe the shorts: their self-interest would induce the shorts to talk the end of the world regardless.