total.pardo

1. The study of causes or origins.

2. The branch of medicine that deals with the causes or origins of disease.

1. Assignment of a cause, an origin, or a reason for something.

2. The cause or origin of a disease or disorder as determined by medical diagnosis.

etiology

photo posted from my iPhone

Information systems should play an essential role in tracking the inputs and outputs of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, or, “the deal to authorize the biggest banking rescue in U.S. history” (Solomon, Paletta, and Hitt). The United States became embroiled in this precarious situation by under-regulating complex new financial products, including mortgage-backed securities. Since regulators did not mandate reporting requirements, no infrastructure was built to track the transactions. Multi-billion dollar credit swaps were completed on handshakes without careful computerized record keeping (to wit, greed trumping caution). Data transparency is critical since these new transactions are complicated and building the systems to make them clear will take time.

First, all of the “toxic debt” (Luhby) will need to be quantified through careful analysis of the records of mortgage brokers and financial institutions. Those agencies have to report their transactions to the Treasury Department electronically, the data will need to be normalized and secured, and analysis should be conducted to determine the disposition of the transactional data. Information systems will provide the backbone for these activities; however, banks and the government will need to mutually agree on many aspects of the required data transfers before the systems can even be written to perform the work.

Second, Section 114 for H.R. 1424 (United States) mandates the Secretary of the Treasury to make electronically available to the public all information of transactions covered under the bill within two business days. This level of reporting will require substantial automation from online analytical processing and data mining applications to cull the databases and report the pertinent information as regulated by the bill.

Third, systematic tracking of transactions once the government owns the notes needs to be established. The challenge is to value the purchase price of any mortgage backed securities; this is a complex exercise subject to variables related to the housing market and the credit quality of the underlying mortgages. The ability of the government to offset the purchase price (through mortgage collections over the long-run – another transaction to be tracked) depends on the valuation assigned to the mortgage backed securities at the time of purchase. Whether the government is ultimately able to resell the assets above the purchase price or will continue to merely collect the mortgage payments is not known, but information systems will need to be established to perform these functions and provide reporting thereto (Solomon, Paletta, and Hitt).

Finally, all of the data from the above transactions and systems should be extracted, transformed, and loaded into a centralized repository for the Trea$ury Department to report on key performance indicators of the progress of the bailout, its affect on the economy, and the status of repayment of the obligation to the taxpayer base. Without a data warehouse to capture all the data created by the stabilization legislation, lawmakers and citizens will not fully understand the outcome of our government’s intervention in the financial crisis.

This student sarcastically notes the separate, yet urgent, need to develop a distinct database required by Sec. 503 under Title 5 to track the voluminous exemptions from the excise tax for certain wooden arrows designed for use by children.