October 28th, 2009 by Paul
In addition to improving asset-backed securities disclosure (using XBRL perhaps?), SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro called for substantive ABS regulation in a speech Tuesday to SIFMA, the parent organization of the American Securitization Forum (link to colorful Michael Lewis description):
ABS Regulation
In one final example, I believe there may be gaps that should be filled in the asset-backed securities (ABS) market. Continue reading ‘Asset-Backed Securities: Disclosure Regulation or Substantive Legislation?’
October 20th, 2009 by Paul
Institutional Risk Analyst co-founder Chris Whalen writes in the new edition of his newsletter:
Until we break the Alliance of Convenience between the Congress, the Fed and the large, TBTF (too big to fail) banks and force our public officials to embrace core American values regarding transparency, insolvency and accountability, we will not in my view find a way out of the crisis.
It’s such a smart piece that I couldn’t decide what to quote, so I just took the most actionable sentence from his last paragraph. Read the entire article. Contemplate it. Pay your $1K to hear from the friendly faces here. And if you have ideas to break the alliance, comment away.
September 14th, 2009 by Paul
True or false?
NIEM is to XBRL as United States customary units are to the Metric System.
The good news is people are working to make sure we don’t need to care. Diane Mueller links to that work from her latest thoughtful piece on the state of transparency. There are alternatives to linking to show authenticity — Continue reading ‘Standards Question: NIEM is to XBRL as United States Customary Units are to the Metric System?’
September 10th, 2009 by Paul
[T]here seems to be a big choice here about how assertive the Federal government; the government in general, but we’re talking here about the Federal government; should be in setting the rules of the road for information exchange. Continue reading ‘Health Information Technology Standards’
June 17th, 2009 by Paul
Update: CBO has published its cost estimate for H.R. 2392.
Bipartisan legislation to make XBRL the standard for disclosure to the U.S. government has been approved in committee and reported to the full House of Representatives for consideration. Here’s the widget to track it from opencongress.org:
Go to the bill on the opencongress.org Web site to comment and cast your vote. Wow, how subversive is this? Analyzing legislation used to be my job — I was a legislative assistant once. Bringing labor-saving technology to banking and securities regulation is one thing, but making L.A.’s on the Hill redundant? What hath sunlight wrought? And what further damage will be done when XBRL makes more government information more transparent?
Note: If you’re wondering how XBRL disclosure is crowd sourced, visit this site for one example. In the case of U.S. GAAP, anyone with an Internet connection and an interest was invited to help decide what data should be tagged.
May 19th, 2009 by Paul
CHICAGO—Introducing myself to participants at the 16th National Conference on Managing Electronic Records Conference the past two days, I explained my recent work not as managing electronic records per se, but as helping to mandate their use – specifically the use of eXtensible Business Reporting Language by public companies, mutual funds, and credit rating agencies.
Most MER Conference speakers and some participants have heard of XML-based XBRL standards. Not surprisingly, participants understand intuitively how bad electronic records practices contributed to the credit crisis by making it difficult to subject information about asset-backed securities to market scrutiny.
Notwithstanding commiseration on the sidelines about ASCII-based non-standard and unstructured “disclosure” and how credit rating agencies exploited Continue reading ‘The Search for Killer Apps in the Knowledge Capital Economy and XBRL World’
May 5th, 2009 by Paul
U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa tweeted a link this morning to this video, a compelling story of the success of education choice in the District of Columbia and the unfathomable decision to terminate it.
There’s also a link to a Washington Post editorial on the Reason site, Continue reading ‘Education, Activism, and New Media’
