Quotes from Gary Weiss

I'm rooting for Saudi Arabia getting a seat on the U.N. Human Rights Council.

Excessive hype, bankruptcy, cash burning like autumn leaves - such is the stuff of short-selling.

Humiliating events have a way of capturing the public's imagination. So it has been since antiquity, when gladiators were pitted against each other and the legions of Spartacus were crucified in endless rows on the way to Rome.

All too often, the pitchmen are selling the notion that if you gain 'control' over your financial destiny - pick your own stocks and execute your own trades - it will be the first step on a short road to riches.

MF Global used to be known as Man Financial, and it had a reasonably good reputation. It did a humdrum business placing commodities trades for fund managers as well as farmers, grain dealers and others whose livelihoods depend on the vagaries of commodity prices.

Some hedge fund managers have made big bucks trading oil futures - George Soros is one.

With such enormous bucks devoted to trading in oil and other commodities, the distortions that they cause have been exacerbated.

The flip side of humiliation is pride.

Numerous academic studies have shown that amateur investors make poor traders - buying stocks for the wrong reasons, holding losers for too long, and acting on whims and emotions.

When the Securities & Exchange Commission settled securities-fraud charges against Richard Harriton, former chairman of the clearing subsidiary of Bear, Stearns & Co., there were smiles all around. The SEC was happy. Harriton was happy. Bear Stearns was happy.

The Amex has a long, often troubled, sometimes glorious history.

Indians are sometimes accused of being condescending toward Westerners and of being excessively preachy in their attitude toward other nations. That accusation is sometimes correct.

When Corporate America finds a Jayson Blair in its midst, the standard operating procedure is to circle the wagons and deny that any form of liability extends up the chain of command.

When it comes to making laws that protect the public from the financial services industry, Congress has done a progressively worse job since the Pecora Commission hearings of the early 1930s, which led to Congress taking bold steps to regulate banking and securities firms in 1933 and 1934.

Even a casual reader of the financial pages knows that microcaps are a perennial headache for regulators and, above all, for investors because they have been prone to abuse by stock manipulators.

Broadcasts from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange have propelled once-obscure financial journalists such as Maria Bartiromo to celebrity status and made CNBC to investors what ESPN is to sports fans.

At their worst, message boards can subject you to mindless braying or outright stock scams. But at their best, they provide meaty insights on just about every stock imaginable.

Short-sellers perform a useful function in the market as conduits of negative information, and shorts often complain that they are discriminated against by regulators.

Mutual funds dare to be average. In fact, they dare to be lousy. They have long since ceased striving for anything resembling perfection when it comes to managing your money.

Legitimate institutions historically have been defenseless in the face of outright fraud.

The problem with the focus on speculators, as was demonstrated during the financial crisis, is that it tends to divert attention from the real villains. During the financial crisis, the villains were the actions of the banks, not the speculators betting on bank share prices.