

Road Map for Financial Recovery: Radical Transparency Now (XBRL) - arjunlall
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/17-03/wp_reboot?currentPage=all

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wmorein
I don't think that this article is really telling the whole story. The
implication seems to be that things just need to be reported in XBRL and that
all the information people doing analysis need is there (just not in a
consumable format).

My side project is an SEC search site (<http://edgarest.com>) so I've spent a
huge amount of time looking through what is available. The disclosure is just
not there -- I'm pretty confident that you couldn't have seen the Bear
collapse from the filings they made. You can look at a huge proportion of the
filings here:
[http://edgarest.com/company/name/777001/BEAR_STEARNS_COMPANI...](http://edgarest.com/company/name/777001/BEAR_STEARNS_COMPANIES_INC)
for Bear itself and <http://edgarest.com/search?q=bear+stearns> for associated
entities. Too much of the trading they do and the assets they hold are still
opaque to SEC reporting. Along with getting people to file using XBRL we'd
have to force companies to increase disclosure (and you'd get a huge amount of
pushback on that).

~~~
jerf
I am not an expert on financials or the SEC, but from reading that story it is
clear to me that there is more at play than the story directly states. Doing
your SEC disclosures in XML is a good start but there's definitely the
suggestion that much, much more should be available; for instance, it sounded
an awful lot like they think securities should have some sort of scheme for
indicating exactly what they contain, which, presumably, should then be
something that could easily be looked up.

I don't know what's in the specific XML format (and I'm not looking it up
right now), but I bet it's URI based, where the URI could back to a real
document that further specifies the nature of that security. Then, the problem
of determining exactly what is in a security reduces from today's effectively
unsolvable problem (!) to, quite likely, a junior or senior level college
homework problem. This seems like a valuable idea.

So I think there's more to this proposal than just annotating SEC disclosures;
I believe the proposal is to convert the entire financial system to using
publicly-available XML formats for pretty much everything they do.

I like it. I don't think it solves all problems, but it solves enough to be
worthwhile. I also think we've got the technology to do it. There are many
nuances I can think of (which would blow this message out too far), but I
think it's a fundamentally sound idea.

Let's see if Obama's administration is half as tech savvy as they've been
advertised as, and sees the merit of this proposal. It'll take time, but it
should be done.

(My only criticism is that this really isn't the road to financial recovery,
it's a road to make the next financial crisis of this nature that much harder
to happen. If a magical switch could be flipped and this was suddenly
implemented today, it would be just as likely to instantly crash the economy
as the full truth comes out. As much as I don't like it, given our current
situation, a bit of hobbling along may be necessary... although the risk of
that approach is extremely high too, really. No easy way out. But, once we've
opened up, staying open should be superior to returning to a closed economy.)

------
gasull
_Today, public companies and financial institutions disclose their activities
in endless documents stuffed with figures and stats. Instead, they should be
forced to file using universal tags that make the data easy to explore._

Semantic web to the rescue.

