Voucher privatization (Russia 1992-1994)

The privatization took place on a much wider scale in the early 1990s, when the government of Russia
deliberately set a goal to sell its assets out. As the Soviet Union
collapsed, the government was forced to manage the huge and inefficient
state enterprise sector inherited from the Soviet ecomomy. Privatization was carried out by the State Committee for State Property Management of the Russian Federation
under Anatoly Chubais with the goal to transform the enterprises into
profit-seeking businesses, not dependent on government subsidies for
their survival. To distribute property quickly and to win popular
support, the reformers decided to rely mostly on the mechanism of free voucher privatization, earlier implemented in Czechoslovakia,
and on the nearly free transfer of shares to employees, as it was
believed that the sell of property instead of the free transfer would
have almost certainly resulted in a further concentration of ownership
among the mafia and the former Soviet political and industrial elite, which they sought to avoid. Nevertheless, contrary to the government's expectations, insiders
managed to have acquired control over most of the assets, which
remained largely dependent on the state budget for years to come. Thus
the initial objectives have not been fully achieved, although a great
deal of assets became privatized remarkably quickly and provided some
basis for market competition. The voucher privatization took place in
1992-1994. The vouchers, each corresponding to a share in the national
wealth, were distributed equally among the population, including
minors. They could be exchanged for shares in the enterprises to be
privatized. Most people, however, weren't well-informed and/or were
very poor and were quick to sell the vouchers for money, unprepared
and/or unwilling to invest^{[citation needed]}.
Most vouchers and hence most shares ended up acquired by the management
of the enterprises. Although Russia's initial privatization legislation
attracted widespread popular support^{[citation needed]}
as it promised to distribute the national wealth among the general
public and ordinary employees of the privatized enterprises, eventually
the public felt deceived, and Anatoly Chubais became one of the most odious public figures in modern Russia. (source wikipedia)

Short Sell - Concept

To profit from a stock price going down, short sellers can borrow a security
and sell it, expecting that it will be cheaper to repurchase in the
future. When the seller decides that the time is right (or when the
lender recalls the shares), the seller buys back the shares in order to
return them to the lender. The process generally relies on the fact
that securities are fungible, so that the shares returned do not need to be the same shares as were originally borrowed.

The short seller borrows from their broker, who usually in turn has borrowed the shares from some other investor who is holding his shares long; the broker itself seldom actually purchases the shares to lend to the short seller.^[1] The lender of the shares does not lose the right to sell the shares.

Short selling is the opposite of "going long." The short seller takes a fundamentally negative, or "bearish"
stance, intending to "sell high and buy low," to reverse the
conventional adage. The act of buying back the shares which were sold
short is called 'covering the short'. Day traders and hedge funds often use short selling to allow them to profit on trading in stocks which they believe are overvalued, just as traditional long investors attempt to profit on stocks which are undervalued by buying those stocks.

In the U.S., in order to sell stocks short, the seller must arrange
for a broker-dealer to confirm that it is able to make delivery of the
shorted securities. This is referred to as a "locate." Brokers have a
variety of means to borrow stocks in order to facilitate locates and
make good delivery of the shorted security.

The vast majority of stock borrowed by U.S. brokers come from loans
made by the leading custody banks and fund management companies (see
list below). Sometimes brokers are able to borrow stocks from their
customers who own "long" positions. In these cases, if the customer has
fully paid for the long position, the broker cannot borrow the security
without the express permission of the customer, and the broker must
provide the customer with collateral and pay a fee to the customer. In
cases where the customer has not fully paid for the long position
(meaning the customer borrowed money from the broker in order to
finance the purchase of the security), the broker will not need to
inform the customer that the long position is being used to effect
delivery of another client's short sale.

Most brokers will allow retail customers to borrow shares to short a
stock only if one of their own customers has purchased the stock on margin.
Brokers will go through the "locate" process outside their own firm to
obtain borrowed shares from other brokers only for their large
institutional customers.

Stock exchanges such as the NYSE or the NASDAQ
typically report the "short interest" of a stock, which gives the
number of shares that have been sold short as a percent of the total float. Alternatively, these can also be expressed as the short interest ratio,
which is the number of shares sold short as a multiple of the average
daily volume. These can be useful tools to spot trends in stock price
movements.

Energy Non-crisis

This is a long video, but I hope you all have time to hear it.