FINANCIAL STABILITY & DATA:
MINDING THE GAPS
Federal Reserve Vice Chair of Supervision, Randal Quarles, and Stanford Business professor, Darrell Duffie kicked off the series the progress on financial stability analysis and data needs since the 2008 financial crisis, what additional gaps the current crisis reveals, and the key issues going forward.
Despite the progress over the last 10 years, there remains unfinished business to get the data needed to analyze financial contagion risks, as the financial stability board noted in their 2019 data gaps report.
Many long-standing issues regarding data needs and gaps, standards, confidentiality, governance and infrastructure remain only partially resolved. In addition, the current crisis highlights important missing information on:
  • Interconnections between the financial and non-financial sectors, where credit and liquidity stresses are so large at present and,
  • The role of banks vs. non-banks in liquidity and credit provision to small businesses and households.
This discussion is the first in a series exploring the key issues that drive financial stability analysis for researchers and policymakers. Future expert session webinars will discuss key areas for improvement including data standards, sharing, infrastructure and governance.

Conference Organizers

Greg Feldberg 

Research Scholar and Director of Research, 
Yale Program on Financial Stability, 
Yale School of Management

Alan King, PhD
IBM Research

Joe Langsam
Research Fellow, Center for Financial Policy, University of Marlyand

Hon. Allan I. Mendelowitz, Ph.D.
President
ACTUS Financial Research Foundation

Arthur Small
Senior Research Scientist, Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service
Adjunct Instructor, Engineering Systems and Environment
University of Virginia
 
Russ Wermers
Dean's Chair in Finance
Chair, Department of Finance
Director, Center for Financial Policy
Robert H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland

About the CE-NIF

The Committee to Establish the National Institute of Finance (CE-NIF) was a citizens’ initiative that advocated for the creation of a new U.S. government entity dedicated to improving the ability of regulators to see emerging threats to financial stability. This entity was to focus on the creation of data standards for collecting detailed information about financial instruments, positions, and obligations to enable regulators to conduct real-time, forward-looking analysis. 

This proposal was incorporated into the Dodd-Frank Act, which created the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC) and a new Office of Financial Research (OFR) within the U.S. Department of the Treasury. 

Ten years later, the CE-NIF has gotten back together to rekindle the discussion about financial stability data and analytics. It plans a series of workshops to assess the progress that the private and public sectors have made since the Global Financial Crisis to improve financial data quality, sharing and governance, key challenges they continue to face, and opportunities that new technologies present.