allaboutadvocacy.com

Recovering from the Financial Mess

  Advocates can help companies recover. So says Daniel Roth in the latest Wired. He says that one way to recover from this paralyzing economic downturn is to create an army of citizen-regulators or as we call them Advocates. “By giving everyone access to every piece of data—and making it easy to crunch—we can crowdsource regulation, creating a self-correcting financial systems and unlocking new ways of measuring the market’s health.” Smart idea. Instead of relying on the SEC who has not been able to detect frauds, review annual reports and convoluted investment products, Roth suggests that advocates do the work. He makes the argument that it is time that we take advantage of the massive parallel processing power at our disposal and by give people the tools for tracking and analyzing financial data. These regulator Advocates can then regulate the markets for us more efficiently than the wizards of Wall Street. “The revolution will be powered by data, which should be unshackled from the pages of regulatory filings and made more flexible and useful.” This dependence on advocates who want to spend the time with the data and can punish or invest in companies that are providing accurate and transparent financial data makes commonsense. Again Roth says it better than I can: “When data is kept under lock and key, as mysterious as a temple secret, only the priests can read and interpret it.” Let’s allow regular data-obsessed people to do the investigatory work and advocate for better companies so that can get out of this mess.