The SEC May Force Hedge Funds to Disclose Short Positions

The SEC is looking to force hedge funds to disclose their short-sale positions, and further plans to subpoena hedge fund records (see Bloomberg article). Why stop there? Why not just make it more difficult to even short a stock? Oh, never mind (see Reuters article). I suspect that if as much attention was paid to making sure that companies were not leveraging over 50-1 as is being given to finding coordinated short selling (which may be impossible to prove BTW, even with disclosure), that short-sellers might be getting their hat handed to them in a more natural way. By the way, if you know that a famous and successful short seller with deep pockets is taking a short position in a certain company, are you more likely to go long or short? Could extra transparency even cause more traders to jump on the pile, making things worse? Would seeing that multiple funds are short a stock make you assume the stock is being manipulated in a coordinated manner, or would it give you more reason to think the stock had issues? The law of unintended consequences may raise its ugly head once again.