The Business World

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) were forced to make a few dramatic changes Friday by banning the routine practice of placing bets against company stocks. This ban is temporary and was set in place in hopes to fix certain economic problems.

In the announcement that was made the commission went on to say that they were acting together with the U.K. Financial Services Authority as an emergency action in order to “prohibit short selling in financial companies” and to protect the securities market’s integrity. They also hope that it will be able to boost the confidence of investors.

GMAC Financial Services and Residential Capital LLC have made the decision to shut down 200 mortgage retail offices and to reduce the workforce for ResCap by close to 60% in order to streamline operations, lower the amount of costs, and to refocus resources on strategic servicing and lending.

ResCap is one of the nation’s largest subprime mortgage lenders and it has been working hard to help make things look up. They lost $4.3 billion in 2007 and spent much of the year restructuring. However, none of their previous plans seemed to work as the losses began to become higher.