Shortside Hedge Funds Might Cause Bank Runs?

I was reading a pretty depressing piece by Cramer about how the stocks of many different kinds of financial companies are now in the toilet and some might not ever recover. This part caught my conspiracy theory seeking eye.

Any short-selling hedge fund could hire 30 actors and have them line up at a Washington Mutual or two and get a bank run going. Then we would have to hear about a "hasty" Treasury department plan to bail out WM. Hasty? How can these guys not see it coming?

Hmm, I wonder if this is an actual viable plan. They would need to hire 30 extras it would cost about a $100 per person per day. So this fund could conceivably pull $3000 out of petty cash (or some shell company) and put in a call to the Local Daily News so that they could film their extras pounding on the doors of their target bank. You just might have a panic on your hands if that Local News is the kind that loves to drum up controversy.

Hawaii newscasts are pretty laid back so it wouldn't work here. However, when I visited Seattle, I remember that KIRO made every purse snatching seem like a crime wave so they would be the perfect tool to do a "bank-run-short-attack" on someone like Washington Mutual.

Hell, this Short Side Hedge Fund could just get their employees to secretly be interviewed by the Local News. These employees would say that they are desperate to pull their money out of the target bank because they are afraid they will be the next IndyMac. I hope the SEC is watching out for a trick like this.

I think the problem is that so many banking CEOs are saying "we are well capitalized" but they go right back to the FED for cashola a few months later. There is a credibility gap with these people. They can't tap equity because their stocks are in the single digits and they can't tap debt because the market has seized up. All they can do is wait until house prices go back up and hope for the best.

I have looked at a few of the banking stocks that Cramer mentions below and it seems that waiting and hoping might just be their strategy. If they can just hold on and not have their customers rush their tellers then they can make it to a period where house prices will stabilize. So you can only be short (or don't touch them at all) until we see a Case-Shiller Home Price Index that isn't dropping anymore. I think that number may be what the market will turn on for the next several months.

No revelation that Lehman or Merrill's in the soup, although I do marvel that at no price do they seem interesting to anyone -- value guys, takeover guys, or acquirers in general. But how about Comerica (CMA - Cramer's Take - Stockpickr), Regions Financial (RF - Cramer's Take - Stockpickr), Sovereign (SOV - Cramer's Take - Stockpickr), Huntington Bancshares (HBAN - Cramer's Take - Stockpickr), Suntrust (STI - Cramer's Take - Stockpickr), Fifth Third (FITB - Cramer's Take - Stockpickr), First Horizon (FHN - Cramer's Take - Stockpickr), Marshall & Ilsley (MI - Cramer's Take - Stockpickr), Zions (ZION - Cramer's Take - Stockpickr), Key (KEY - Cramer's Take - Stockpickr), Colonial (CNB - Cramer's Take - Stockpickr) and BB&T (BBT - Cramer's Take - Stockpickr)?