Both companies pioneered the XBRL data standard now used by stock exchanges, banking authorities and tax agencies around the world. Accountant Charles Hoffman, of UBmatrix, started the ball rolling ten years ago when he saw the potential for XML technology to turn a financial report into information that could easily be shared amongst application. Up to the minute data could be shared online by all the various departments in a company without any cutting and pasting: a revolutionary concept. It was around the same time EDGAR Online had realized the internet could be used for fast delivery of value-added data from the public company reports being filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

It was also the time of the Enron scandal and a public cry for greater detail and transparency in company reporting. XBRL, an XML-based language specific to business data, seemed to offer the solution.

Hoffman and EDGAR Online were among the small group of idealists that formed the not-for-profit volunteer effort to make XBRL a reality. It’s been a long, slow, international effort, but XBRL is today the global standard in business reporting, and mandated by the SEC. (For the full history of how and why XBRL was developed, here’s an article published by the AICPA’s Accountancy Journal, based on Hoffman’s 10-year chronicle.)

As the two companies evolved, EDGAR Online continued to focus on the analyst community, who wanted comprehensive, detailed information, while UBmatrix focused on the needs of corporate financial reporting teams and regulators. But the needs of the two groups overlap. A financial professional can be just as concerned about creating reports or regulating reports as they are about having access to comprehensive data and about analyzing it.

So the companies are extremely complimentary in what they offer to the financial world, including any company that must report to the SEC, governmental regulators, and analysts of all sizes and levels of sophistication.

Another way the companies mesh is that EDGAR Online offers services for corporations preparing XBRL translations of their financial reports for SEC filing, while UBmatrix offers software to enterprise application vendors who are developing exciting new applications to create, consume and leverage the growing availability of interactive data.

Here’s the official press release on the merger (following shareholder approval): EDGAR Online and UBmatrix Merge, Creating Global XBRL Leader.

The SEC staff discussed both the rule requirements and the XBRL taxonomy, which is the list of tags associated with the risk/return summary. Both the webinar and the accompanying slide show are archived.

In related news, EDGAR Online has partnered with Issuer Direct to help mutual funds comply with the SEC mandate. Additionally, the two companies will integrate EDGAR Online’s XBRL tools into Issuer Direct’s Interactive Fund Platform. Here’s the official press release.

Perhaps it was a classic problem of the House versus the Senate, or perhaps it was the result of some overreaching by Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., who has earned the unofficial title of Obama’s Annoyer-in-Chief. The amendment he originally proposed for the Dodd-Frank Financial Regulatory Reform bill would have required regulators to use a standard electronic format, such as Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL), but only for a few types of transactions, collecting and publishing business information from the financial industry.

But Issa withdrew his original proposal to work on an expanded version with the staff of the House Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank, D-Mass. The new proposal would have affected almost every financial data collection in the regulatory overhaul bill.

NextGov.com reports that not even Issa knows what killed the amendment, but when the bill took final shape in the Senate, all mention of data transparency had disappeared. It had mysteriously vanished in the final hours of congressional negotiation. Says Issa, “… when I’ve asked the Senate, ‘What happened? How did it just die?’ I can’t even find somebody who says, ‘I didn’t like it, there was something wrong with it.’

Frank has committed to sending the proposal to the House floor under expedited voting procedures and to try again. “That’s as best we can do,” he said.

As Mark Bolgiano, President and CEO of the XBRL US organization pointed out in his premature congratulations to community members, “XBRL adoption is, without a doubt, an endurance sport…” He got that right.

1. Anheuser-Busch Inbev S.A.
2. Beer Across America
3. United Breweries Company
4. Boston Beer Company
5. Molson Coors Brewing

Check your answers!

We extend our condolences to the retirees of company 5. Molson Coors Brewing.  Be careful the next time you say Beer Me! You might have to pay.

Here’s how you can find this and other type of employee benefit information if you have an EDGAR Pro or I-Metrix subscription (or want to try a 7-day free trial).

At the EDGAR Pro Search Tab, we entered “free beer” for a Full Text Search. We narrowed our results by choosing Annual Reports and Quarterly Reports (See image below), and then clicked to Search again.

We clicked on HTML view icon, highlighted in yellow, getting excited about our search for “free beer”.

But alas, when we opened the Molson Coors Brewing Co. 10-Q, the search feature took us to where the phrase “free beer” appears in the SEC filing. Sad to say, the company’s Canadian retirees will no longer be compensated in liquid assets.

Cheers!

This six-minute presentation was made for non-technical web users to get the basic idea behind the semantic web. The original World Wide Web solved the problem of how to find and then display a document (or web page). And that has been amazing. But the Web can only respond passively to the exact keywords you use; it cannot grasp what you really want and then actively go in search of things you may not even have thought to ask for. With the semantic web, search engines will be able to find more content and read through it, selecting web pages, people, places, companies, events, and more, all of which are relevant to your query, but which were not included in your keywords.

What makes a semantic search possible is additional coding (behind the scene) of the content posted on website. Right now, most of it is in HTML, but additional computer-readable tags can identify the “meaning” of specific content.

This is exactly how XBRL works, and why this new format for business reporting is considered the ideal match for the rapidly evolving semantic web. XBRL “tags” are added to numbers or text in a financial report. The tags explain and identify the original context (the semantic meaning) behind the number functioning as a bar code. For example, the tag can identify a number as IBM > net income > 2010 > in US dollars. XBRL-enabled software can search the Web and “read” vast numbers of financial reports, finding business information that is highly relevant to your query – and which would never have found in a standard keyword search.

Already Inline XBRL (iXBRL) provides a standard for embedding XBRL fragments into an HTML document, using a Firefox browser extension. While the HTML code of a Web page determines how the page will look, you can add XBRL instructions to the content, so the page can be read by other XBRL-enabled software – all behind the scenes.

If you are not technically inclined, don’t worry. You didn’t have to become a computer programmer to use the Web; you won’t have to become one to use the far greater powers of the semantic Web. The Semantic Web is an evolving development of the World Wide Web in which the meaning (semantics) of information on the web is defined, and can be read by computers.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission supports IFRS as the best option for a single set of high-quality global accounting standards, and if the commission decides next year to converge U.S. GAAP and IFRS for the U.S. market, public companies will have some years to prepare before the predicted 2015 or 2016 conversion begins.

The new white paper, Financial System Considerations in IFRS Conversion Projects, gives a brief background on IFRS, which is now used or permitted by more than 100 countries.

Because of its widespread use, many U.S.-based multi-national companies are already using IFRS in some areas of their business, reducing country-by-country disparities in financial reporting. But for most U.S. companies, conversion will be a complex challenge. This paper will help you prepare.

Capitalism, as she defines it, is not simply an economic system, but rather a cultural system based on a particular economy. It is constantly changing, constantly finding ways to enhance production through private initiatives that affect every aspect of life, and are in turn affected by every aspect of life.

Appleby is a first-rate historian, a past president of the American Historical Association, so her narration is filled with insights about the social events that played into or made possible the development of capitalism –the market’s messy entanglements with society and culture. And these are different in each country. Her narration of the rise of the market economy is not driven by economic theory or political ideology. Her assessment of capitalism’s strengths and weaknesses is balanced, stressing both the prosperity capitalism has brought, and also the social problems it creates, due to capitalism’s main feature being “change.”

In her cover feature interview on ROROTOKO, she says her curiosity about capitalism began “with a question about changing conceptions of human nature. In the beginning of the 17th century human beings were depicted in sermons and literature as fickle, impulsive, and prone to self-destructive behavior. Yet at the end, English writers started talking about the predictability of people’s actions in their market relations. Soon this economic definition became the dominant one.”

She read contemporary pamphlets, broadsides, and books examining England’s expanding market relations, and “discovered where the new definition of human nature came in and learned how central to capitalism are the ways people have analyzed their economy—first in puzzled awe, then in critical assessment, and finally through the expertise of specialists.”

“Where commerce could live within the interstices of society with its customary mores and aristocratic habits, the capitalist system forced widespread social and political change because its momentum involved more and more of society’s population. For this reason, there are in today’s world many variants of capitalist culture as different nations align economic restructuring with the basic qualities of their people.”

At a time when everyone is searching for or shouting out their opinions about the direction of the economy, it’s a treat to take a long, historical view. This is one

We think this subscriber was pulling our leg, but we might be interested ourselves in the answer. Maybe one of our readers can help. “I’m looking for a product Riviera`Brands used to distribute which I really liked. Do they still make this product “Men’s Zone” wrinkle repair?

“Please contact me immediately,” asked another hopeful subscriber, “my hushband died in the philippines.i dont know how to get my pension from the japanese government.” She left her name, email and phone number, which we forwarded to the sales department. Who knows?

1. Iraq
2. South Africa
3. United Arab Emirates
4. Finland
5. China

Check your answers!

The answer is 3, United Arab Emirates.

As reported in the country’s National newspaper Sunday, XBRL will be implemented by Abu Dhabi’s stock exchange by the end of the year. The company, called the Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange or ADX, has been considering XBRL for four years, the newspaper says.

ADX deputy director and national XBRL steering committee head Rashed al Baloushi noted that XBRL would provide manifold benefits to investors and regulators alike. The language, he said, allows traders “to even compare companies against other companies and sector by sector.”

(And for those who answered 5, China, this was the first country to adopt XBRL, in 2004.)

Kondratieff’s model of the Long Cycle, developed in the 1920s, likens financial and economic cycles to a human lifespan of 60 to 70 years, broken into four 10 to 20 year “K-waves” of spring, summer, autumn, and winter. They are easy to remember because they follow the natural progression of the seasons, and of human life.

Spring, for example, brings economic birth, expanded production, affluence, rising wages, less unemployment, which reaches its apex in the summer cycle, where resources become more limited, production decreases, and there’s even some signs of back-lash against an economy of abundance. Come autumn, life’s bills start arriving. This cycle brings deflation and a rapid increase in debt as everyone’s habits have settled into a life of over consumption.

Winter brings death by debt. Some say that’s where the developed world is today. Debt gets purged from the economy, either by deflation or inflation, opening the way for a rebirth in spring.

Today, the K-Wave pattern Kondratieff defined is sometimes used to trace the evolution of the global economy, and help make politico-economic predictions. Students of global economics have been very interested in the tendency for nations to go to war during the long transition between an economic winter and spring, the classic example being the Great Depression and World War II.

K-waves are easier to indentify when looking at international production data than at a particular nation’s economy, and they are more visible in looking at output rather than prices or surges in particular sectors. So the indicators that most economists focus on, such as gross domestic product, short-term business cycles and the stock fluctuations aren’t useful in seeing the long cycle. K-Wave starts during a time of downswing and generalized slow-down and are caused by the demand for innovation and solutions to new problems. But because winter and spring overlap and each K-Wave is driven by different types of growth, it’s easy not to see that one is beginning.

The last wave was driven by the technology sector, and is considered the 19^th K-Wave in the global economy. Here’s a chart tracing them back to the first one, over a thousand years ago, driven by advances in printing and paper. According to George Modelski, Professor Emeritus, Political Science, University of Washington, “…it is now quite widely agreed that the leading sectors of the late 1990s are the information industries and that the K-wave 19 has now moved into higher gear, for a period likely to extend for some two-three decades, into the 2020s.

Fascinating stuff.

Another economist who believes we just crossed the midpoint of a Kondratieff winter that started in 2000, is Larry Jeddeloh, Editor of The Institutional Strategist and CIO of TIS Group, which advises money managers on investment strategies. He sees the attempts of government to produce counter-cyclical actions as ways of helping the U.S. economy adjust over time and avoid a crash/depression in the winter of this long cycle. “While one can easily understand why such a policy prescription might be devised,” says Jeffeloh, “the result has been an expansive fiscal/super easy monetary policy…[which] practically guaranteed it would continue for some time by refusing to let the markets and economy fully adjust.” We quote him here from a column by investment manager Alan Weiss who warns that “coming out of a Kondratieff winter takes time…not months, years.”