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The worldwide financial Crash of 2008 revealed serious problems with the way capital markets are functioning:

• Investment research: Too many smart people didn’t know how to value securities — too much information, too little understanding;
• Corporate governance: Too many executives of public companies were making too much money for bogus performance, while shareholders and creditors suffered;
• Institutional failure: The largest financial institutions had become too big and too complex to manage. Central bankers not only failed to act against systemic risk in time — but showed they didn’t know what to do, once the crisis was evident;
• Flawed economic analysis: Ever since Alan Greenspan spoke of ‘irrational exuberance’, it has been clear that some in the Federal Reserve don’t know how to interpret their own flow of funds statistics. Many students of economics are also not taught to use this valuable resource.

In this blog, I write on all these topics, from the point of view of trying to make capital markets better. Capitalism works, but only if the players have moral values and when the government plays a proper role. (See: Adam Smith, “The Theory of Moral Sentiments“)

This is not what has been observed leading up to the Crash of 2008.

Twitter is a simple micro-blogging service that offers possibilities for viral marketing of ideas.

Spreading the word

Good ideas and useful research mean nothing unless widely propagated among people that are opinion makers. The answers to the global economic crisis and how to make capital market better are out there, someplace.

The Internet allows millions to get into the publishing business on a shoestring. However, there are many excellent economic-financial blogs with limited circulation.

Presenting ideas to a wide audience involves marketing. Before social networks, this meant having a good position on the search engines, which, in turn, required many incoming links from high profile, prestige sites.

But even this is not good enough if you’re dealing with a topic that is not in the daily news. After all, you only find something on Google if you know what search terms to type in.

Twitter power

Social networks have changed this, especially the Twitter platform, which is a form of micro-blogging open to all.

The beauty of twitter is its simplicity.

A twitter 'curator' can compile a list of mini-bloggers on a certain topic.

With twitter, anyone can draw attention to any article in any blog — it’s not necessary to wait for links from other websites to be recognized by Google or Yahoo.

With Twitter, a blogger may highlight articles in blogs that deal with certain topics, directing traffic to the blog, and also providing information to the blogger’s readers about the matters discussed.

A feature that has the potential to propagate ideas is the twitter list, which may be a list of micro-bloggers that post on a certain topic, providing links to sites with more extensive discussion.

Twitter lists may be subscribed or promoted by anyone, expanding the dissemination of ideas.

Each twitter list has a curator that selects the micro-bloggers (twitterers) to add to a specific list. The list is posted on the curator’s home page and anyone in the twitter system can subscribe.

My four twitter lists

Suggest sites for my lists

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Twitter Name (required)

Related website (required)

List(s) relevant to this Twitter name

 analysis governance research reform

This blog acts as a community organizer for research and opinion on topics related to improving financial markets. I am curator for four twitter lists that correspond the topics indicated above.

1. analysis: Sites that discuss flow of funds accounts, or flow of fund concepts.
2. governance: Sites that discuss corporate governance, the ethics of executive remuneration, shareholder protection, and the regulation of stock buybacks.
3. research: Sites that discuss post modern securities research, collaborative research techniques, semantic wikis, OSINT techniques applied to investments, or crowd-sourcing of financial research.
4. reform: Sites that discuss regulation of financial markets, including legal and accounting matters, rules governing exchanges, broker-dealers, banks, and other market institutions.

If you know of any websites that are linked to twitter users that you think fit into any of these four categories, please send me the name of the twitterer and the related site, using the above form.

I’ll check out the site and the quality of the related tweets and, hopefully, will be able to add the site to one or more of my lists.

You are welcome to recommend your own twitter account and related site.