"globally consistent, computer-readable format"

L. Gordon Crovitz Says Transparency Is More Powerful Than Regulation - WSJ.com:

...It didn't get much attention, but earlier this month Congress got a lesson on the potential of better disclosure. "Today's financial crisis was driven in part by a lack of accurate, easily usable information to give investors what they need to make informed, responsible decisions," testified Mark Bolgiano, chief executive of a nonprofit technology and accounting consortium called XBRL US. "The value of toxic asset-backed securities remains a mystery because information on the underlying loans and ongoing viability of those loans and the securities themselves was not collected consistently and even if it had been, it would not have been in a usable, portable form."

XBRL sounds complicated, but eXtensible Business Reporting Language is simply a new technology language that allows data to be easily extracted, searched and analyzed. XBRL is already being used for some equity disclosures, tagging financial information into a globally consistent, computer-readable format.

Philip Moyer, who runs the Edgar Online service that distributes SEC data, studied more than 500 mortgage-backed securities priced between 2006 and mid-2008. He found there were only 600 relevant data points needed to assess the risk of a mortgage, which is many fewer than the tens of thousands of factors used to report on stocks. "This crisis has proven that lack of transparency ultimately destroys a market," Mr. Moyers said.

The good news is that with the innovation of XBRL, tracking debt instruments is no longer a technological challenge. Instead, it's a political challenge....

It's a political challenge, and unfortunately our biggest deficit is in political leadership. This is an area where a crisis shouldn't be wasted. Perhaps if XBRL were re-packaged as something that might destroy capitalism?