The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) voted yesterday to end price restrictions on short selling, meaning that investors seeking to sell a share that they do not own will no longer be barred from doing so because the price of the stock is falling, the New York Times reported today. The 5-to-0 vote, ending a rule that had been in place since 1938, when short sellers were blamed by some critics for having caused the 1929 market crash and the Depression that followed, came as the commission also voted to make it harder to engage in naked shorting, the practice of selling shares that have not been purchased or borrowed. SEC chairman Christopher Cox called naked short selling “a fraud that the commission is bound to prevent and to punish.” The SEC adopted a rule, known as Regulation SHO, in 2004 that was intended to reduce naked short selling by requiring the publication each day of a list of securities with heavy fails. Brokers are required to cure the fails within 13 days. But fails existing before the stock went on the list were grandfathered. Yesterday’s vote will remove the grandfather provision, and the commission said it was also considering removing an exemption from the rule for options market makers who need to sell short to hedge an options position.