Thoughts on policy, business, disclosure, and communications
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. [...]
Judge Posner’s Wall Street Journal op-ed on Thursday got me thinking. Equity spun out of control in the 1920s, crashed, severely damaged the economy, and was controlled not only by forcing equity to be more transparent, but also, strangely enough, by regulation to control banks. Twenty years ago, I participated in a mini policy boomlet [...]
Yesterday I blogged about a Wiki I posted to improve the public comment process for federal regulation. I seeded the Wiki with a proposal to let the market solve the short selling controversy by letting issuers or shareholders set their own rules about what investors can do with shares in their particular company. Then the [...]
Of the millions of recent words on economic conditions, words about three factors seem relatively underrepresented. 1) the preferential treatment of mortgage interest via its relative subsidy in the form of a tax deduction 2) the preferential treatment of residential capital gains over business
Hernando de Soto’s brilliant Wall Street Journal op-ed today, “Toxic Assets Were Hidden Assets,” contains a wealth of common sense. Among the ideas worth mining is his insistence that “[a]ll documents and the assets and transactions they represent or are derived from must be recorded in publicly accessible registries.” This brings to mind the largely [...]
A redeeming thing about a crisis is that it brings out good things in people. The debt crisis has delivered an onslaught of good writing made particularly visible by the coincidental and exponential development of Internet publishing. Having enjoyed the luxury of time to read some of it the past few days and having personally [...]
XBRL US produced a remarkable 29-page document explaining how adoption of an industry standard computer language could expedite economic recovery. The organization’s CEO, Mark Bolgiano, presented it to Congress at a hearing today. Also today, XBRL US posted for comment a 20-page white paper entitled “Bringing Transparency to the Mortgage-backed Securities Market.” Let’s hope the [...]