Quote:

---

In finance, a failure to deliver (plural fails-to-deliver) is the inability of a party to deliver a tradable asset, or meet a contractual obligation. A typical example is the failure to deliver shares as part of a short transaction. The Securities and Exchange Commission publishes "fails-to-deliver" data regarding transactions in the United States.[1]
As a remedy for this in the United States, Regulation SHO was designed.[2] Stocks bought and sold in transaction must be settled within 2 days. The buyer must deliver the cash and the seller the stock. If either party fails, a failure-to-deliver takes place.[3] Sometimes deliberate fails-to-deliver are used to profit from falling stocks (see Bear market), so that the stock can later be purchased at a lower price, then delivered, e.g. in the week of March 10, 2008, just before the failure of Bear Stearns, the fails-to-deliver increased by 10,800 percent.[3]
According to CNN in the US markets, fails-to-deliver had reached $200 billion a day in September 2011 , but no similar data has been available for Europe

---