Are financial regulators still flying blind when it comes to derivatives exposures?

It depends on who you ask.

On the one hand, there’s the Financial Stability Board’s paper – OTC Derivatives Market Reform: Sixth Progress Report on Implementation. It states (on page 29) that the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation’s (DTCC) trade repository has captured 99% of all interest rate derivatives contracts outstanding and 100% of credit default swaps outstanding, when compared to the Bank for International Settlements’ semiannual survey.

That’s pretty good – and it shows the tremendous improvement in regulatory transparency since the global financial crisis.

To see for yourself, have a look at ISDA’s new website – ISDA SwapsInfo.org – which takes all of the public information reported by DTCC and transforms it into user-friendly charts and graphs. You can view activity and notional outstanding by currency, product type and maturity. This includes, by the way, market risk activity for the range of credit derivatives products.

It’s worth noting that the information available to the public on this site and through the DTCC warehouse is only part of the data available to regulators.

So that’s the good news. There is, however, “the other hand” to consider. And it includes a collection of stories like this one from Bloomberg View. These articles claim transparency is still not where it should be and much more work remains to be done.

And you know what? In some cases, they are spot on. There is, for example, an increased threat of fragmentation in trade reporting because of competing trade repositories in different jurisdictions. As the Bloomberg article notes, this could impede the goal of greater regulatory transparency.

It’s also true that data alone is insufficient to give regulators the information and knowledge they need and require. In fact, in some cases, data alone might do more harm than good by providing a false sense of security without providing a true level of understanding.

So what’s the bottom line here?

Improvements – real improvements – have been made in ensuring data regarding activity levels and risk exposures are appropriately reported. We have come a long way since 2008.

But now, derivatives industry market participants and regulators need to work together on an important goal. It’s to ensure the information being requested is on point, addresses key public policy and risk management needs, and is timely.

Otherwise, we won’t be flying blind…but we will be running around in circles.