X marks the spot

In the March edition of CFA Institute's EMEA Newsletter Connexions, I have a tiny piece about CFA Institute's recent response (all responses) to CESR's call for evidence on the use of a standard reporting format. We still have a long way to go.

The defenestration of Prague

Last week, the ECJ passed an interesting judgment in the case C-343/08 EU Commission vs Czech Republic. The Czech Republic argued that there wasn't any point in transposing a number of provisions of the directive as IORPs were not provided for in the Czech retirement system which only knows the first and the third pillar. The Court however did not share that existentialist line of argument and took the constructivist view that a second pillar may be introduced at any time, in which eventuality the rules required by the directive already need to be in place.

While the Czech position appeals to a layman's common sense rather better than the somewhat fundamentalist approach taken by the Court, one important aspect has escaped IPE's attention: The judgment includes a thinly veiled hint (paragraphs 63, 64) that the Court may find the Czech prohibition on IORP establishment in the country in breach with the Treaties' rules on free circulation. That in itself is a valuable signal.

It has barely begun

On Thursday, I attended a Goldman Sachs investment conference in Lucerne. Jim O'Neill, the firm's chief strategist, gave the keynote presentation containing an outlook for the world economy, which was surprisingly optimistic (this year's global growth rate is expected at 4.4% vs 3.9% consensus). To my question where deleveraging was in that picture, he answered that it wasn't because there is no reliable information about leverage available, and that we shouldn't trust anyone who claims to have it.

It appears to be more than a little cavalier to ignore a presumably major phenomenon simply because it is hard to measure. It is therefore very timely that MGI has just published a major report on debt and deleveraging. MGI looks at the buildup of debt at a per country and per sector level and distills four archetypal deleveraging scenarios from past episodes: Austerity, Inflation, Default and Growth. Unsurprisingly, they find that deleveraging has only just begun in a quite moderate way, as private sector debt reduction is compensated by increasing public sector debt.

Responses to CESR

The responses to CESR's call for evidence on the use of standard reporting formats are in, and they contain a mixed bag of answers. Of the 33 responses listed, only 31 appear to be valid (one was obviously misplaced, one materially empty). Furthermore, the categorisation of respondents used by CESR looks arbitrary, which is why we've applied our own.

Essentially, we were curious whether respondents supported standard reporting (Q1), and if so, whether XBRL would be fit for the purpose (Q2).

• Q1: Respondents were mostly in favour of standardisation (74%), although a sizeable part (7) of those favourable answers came from the XBRL community. Without them, 67% of responses are still in favour, notably investors, exchanges and service providers. The most outspoken opposition to standardisation comes from the issuers camp, especially (and unsurprisingly) from banking institutions.
• Q2: Respondents were overwhelmingly in favour of XBRL as the most appropriate format (90%, or 88% without XBRL community). Surprisingly, this even holds true for those respondents who were sceptical about standardisation in the first place. 

The responses from issuers (EAPB, EBF, ZKA, DAI) are remarkable in that they focus on the lack of effective standardisation (and thus comparability) in today's corporate accounts across countries and industries, in spite of those accounts being prepared under IFRS. They quote local laws and regulations as inhibitors to effective standardisation, which could not be overcome by simply applying the IFRS taxonomy because it did not provide the necessary local concepts, nor could it be ascertained that nominally identical concepts are materially identical in practice. In my view, these issues are known and need to be addressed by means of an appropriate system of standardised extensions of the IFRS taxonomy.

Eight good reasons to keep tags on XBRL

Likemind has produced a nice write-up of the breakfast meeting to which I was invited to present the investor perspective on XBRL to a group of corporate communications professionals on 24 September in London. The event itself was very pleasant with a lot of questions and discussions among participants, and I think this comes across nicely in the conversational style of the paper.

Here are the slides that you see sitting on the table: