The deeper issue is the SEC not cracking down on the fail to delivers and naked short selling.

I think Robinhood and other brokerages are the scape goats here. Their hands where tied when the companies that processed their orders refused to process trades for those stocks.

The whole debacle has exposed a lot of corrupt, fraud and other nasties while showing the SEC is completely unwilling to do their job.

No they didn't. Naked short selling is different from short selling while the short interest is high.

Seller A borrows a share, sells it to buyer B. Buyer B then leases the share to Seller C, who then short sells it. This is not a naked short, but a plain ol' short sale.

A naked short would be where Seller A doesn't own a share, but sells one to Buyer B anyway, with a contract stipulating the time the seller must buy and deliver the share. With the exception of market makers, this is illegal but ridiculously easy to detect, since Seller A's sales exceed the number of shares purchased. There is zero evidence any of the hedge funds were short selling.

Do you mean, this is legal for market makers?

Is there any other way that the number of shares being shorted, could be greater than the number of shares in existence?

Yes. They need to be able to make naked shorts, as this is what allows traders to buy a share without having a willing seller at any given moment and vice versa.

> Is there any other way that the number of shares being shorted, could be greater than the number of shares in existence?

As I mentioned, It's perfectly cromulent to have multiple non-naked shorts on the same shares, so the short interest as a percentage of float can certainly exceed 100% without any illegal behavior. I imagine the reason for this misconception is that people think of a short as an "anti-share" that can't exceed the number of shares being traded, when it's really a more abstract investment tactic or contract.

Yes, market makers are allowed to sell short without having a locate.

It should be noted that the market makers will attempt to zero out their total exposure by the end of the trading session.

It may be in the national interest to impose "reserve requirements" on brokerages in order to prevent too much perversion of market prices.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron_scandal#Timeline_of_down...

You can still get a short interest above 100% without selling naked calls/shorts.

The main difference between a conspiracy theory and a valid theory is that a conspiracy theory is non-falsifiable; any evidence to the contrary is dismissed as "fake news" or "the deep state is hiding the evidence".

In your example here of "they testified to Congress under penalty of perjury", the response will be "Ya, they lied, because they knew the whole system would back them. They faked all of the records that show that they didn't actually do it!".

Now this isn't to say that a conspiracy theory can't be right in the end, but that still doesn't make it a valid theory.

Likewise: if you're debating a claim with someone who is being intellectually honest, they'll receive your evidence and consider it critically on the merits. If you debate a claim with a conspiracy theorist, they will use any evidence you provide them to support the idea that the conspiracy theory is even bigger than they could have imagined - more parties are corrupt, more people are in on it, etc.

It's exhausting.