Virtual Oversight over Transnational Capitalism

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Virtual Oversight over Transnational Capitalism

• XBRL metadata and renewed government
• control of the global economy

Dr David Kreps, University of Salford Renfred
Wong, University of Bath
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Agenda

• Heim's ideas about Virtuality
• Digital markets
• Egovernment Transparency
• XBRL
• Latour's Inscription
• Gramsci's Hegemony

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Virtuality

• Michael Heim
• Strong virtuality
• immersion, interaction, intensity
• Weak Virtuality
• information society...

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Digital Markets

• Castells
• 24hr global capital flows
• integrated financial markets working in real time
• billion dollar transactions in seconds

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Crunch

• Sub-prime mortgages
• CDOs
• Lending pyramid on defaulting base
• Bear Stearns, Lehman Bros, AIG
• Uncertainty no borrowing or lending crunch
• High profile fraud - Enron, Bernard Madoff and
  others

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Transparency

• eGovernment - transparency
• Electronic middle-men dont take a cut or bribe
• Better targeting and accountability
• Detailed audit trail

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• eXtensible Business Reporting Language
• Metadata - data about data, Resource
  description, information retrieval,
  interoperability, ownership, information
  management
• XML based - eXtensible Markup Language
• XML - general-purpose specification for creating
  custom markup languages

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XBRL

• Charlie Hoffman
• Director of Industry Solutions-Financial
  Reporting at UBMatrix, Silicon Valley
• 1998 - Certified Public Accountant
• Proposed XBRL to High Tech Task Force of American
  Institute of Certified Public Accountants
• XBRL International - not-for-profit consortium of
  c550 co's agencies

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XBRL Transparency

• XBRL - knowledge management taxonomy (dictionary)
  for financial information, not unlike bar-coding
• Static financial information made interactive
• Allows financial information to be extracted and
  compared instantaneously
• Saves analysts, regulators and other reporting
  authorities considerable time
• Creates level playing field in terms of access

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Implementation

• China, Japan, Korea, Singapore and Spain -
  primary filing format.
• Japan - all public company reports
• Canada and other countries - voluntary programs
  ... so far

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Implementation - US

• May 2008 US Securities Exchange Commission
  (SEC)
• announced plan to require both US and foreign
  filers use XBRL
• Large filers - c500 companies with a market
  capitalisation gt 5bn (2.5bn) from late 2008
• Foreign filers using International Financial
  Reporting Standards to follow in 2011.

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Updates

• IFRS Taxonomy 2008
• complete translation of International Financial
  Reporting Standards into XBRL
• issued by The International Accounting Standards
  Committee (IASC) Foundation

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Wait and see

• A number of the major economies are still trying
  to wait and see
• Priority given to harmonisation of domestic
  generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP)
  with International Financial Reporting Standards
  (IFRS) and/or International Accounting Standards
  (IAS).

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XBRL and Heim

• strong (ish) virtuality
• Immersion - located within the virtual realm of
  transnational financial flows, marking up with
  transparent metadata every detail of each of
  transaction
• Interaction - such immersion immediately changes
  the global financial scene into one no longer
  capable of harbouring the kind of obscurity,
  obfuscation and misleading complexity that
  brought about the credit crunch
• Information intensity - global and intricate in
  scale

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Inscription

• XBRL achieves transparency by inscription
• Inscription - Bruno Latour - refers to the way
  artefacts (including code languages) embody
  patterns or scenarios of use
• Inscription can be used to describe how
  concrete anticipations and restrictions of future
  patterns of use are involved in the development
  and use of a technology

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Hegemonic Shift

• Wider political and social change
• Gramsci recognised that social power is not a
  simple matter of domination on the one hand and
  subordination or resistance on the other.
• dominant groups govern with consent - they
  achieve hegemony
• XBRL-part of an inscription that seeks to return
  hegemonic control of transnational capitalism to
  democratically elected governments

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Conclusion

• Image of virtuality as both medium of
  transnational capitalism through digital markets,
  and tool of social policy through financial
  regulation
• Between Heims strong weak virtuality
• In the realm where XBRL is set to translate its
  inscription, technology and social policy are
  united and interlinked, at the nub of a
  geopolitical struggle between transnational
  capitalists and government regulators for
  supremacy over the market.

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Contact

• Dr David Krepsd.g.kreps_at_salford.ac.ukhttp//snip
  r.com/davidkreps