Important data was available from official suppliers before the crisis but was not known about by users and was not available quickly enough.
The IMF and the Financial Stability Board (FSB) are working together to help identify the information gaps exposed by the global economic crisis and to come up with appropriate responses. The two institutions convened a two-day conference, July 8–9, to discuss ways to plug the gaps with officials from central banks and ministries of finance.
Besides this conference, the
IMF has already launched a number of initiatives in this area. The
IMF recently established the Interagency Group on Economic and Financial Statistics involving the Bank for International Settlements, the European Central Bank, Eurostat, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, the United Nations and the World Bank.
Participants identified a number of priorities to help fill information gaps:
• Monitor the exposures and activities of systemically important financial institutions at the global level.
• Review and broaden the coverage of Financial Soundness Indicators, with a particular emphasis on those indicators that were useful for financial stability analysis.
• Capture data on the shadow banking sector — broadly defined as financial intermediation by institutions, markets and products outside of the banking sector and traditional securities markets.
• Improve the information available on the vulnerabilities of the non-financial corporate sector and households, starting with flow-of-funds and balance sheet data.
• Enhance the data available on cross-border financial flows, so-called from-whom-to-whom databases, as well as external debt statistics, to enable better monitoring of exposures of domestic entities to foreign shocks.
• Give more emphasis to indicators of financial system tail risk to data that is more granular and to information on the distribution of risk within markets and across institutions, since these over time may contain important signs of emerging vulnerabilities.
• Improve data on residential and commercial real estate.
• Collect data on the nature of the assets underlying securitized products and on the risk exposures arising from credit risk transfer instruments, such as credit default swaps.
© International Monetary Fund
Key
Hover over the blue highlighted
text to view the acronym meaning
Hover
over these icons for more information
Comments:
No Comments for this Article