Where crisis management has got better

As the international financial system totters to the brink there is some silver lining in the way the public is being kept informed online, says David Bowen.

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Update on the financial crisis online. A little while ago I said that the central banks were not using their sites to communicate well, especially with the public. I have good news, at least from the US.

The Federal Reserve (federalreserve.gov) has now drawn its “information regarding recent Federal Reserve actions” together into an index page. Here you have a day-by-day collection of announcements, starting with the Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae affair on 14 September and going up to AIG on 29 September (yesterday as I write this). It also links to announcements of coordinated actions on other central bank sites. This seems a simple and sensible way of providing a one-stop shop of horrors and will save much trawling through different pages and sites. Shell did the same when it had its reserves crisis a while ago – it makes sense.

The Fed has also refined its Foreclosure Resources for Consumers – useful, and an acknowledgement that central banks are supposed to be public institutions with a duty to ‘us’ (the voting down by the US Congress of the proposed rescue package may jog their memory on this). The Fed does not provide much information itself, but points to sites elsewhere that do. These include various government agency sites, in particular those belonging to the regional Federal Reserves.

Customised bundling

One of the oddities of the US central banking system is a strength here. There are 12 regional Federal Reserve banks and each can concentrate on providing resources for its own area (and also pointing to the best bits on other Fed sites).

So, the San Francisco Fed (frbsf.org) has a Community Foreclosure Mitigation Kit, a step-by-step guide for community officials trying to reduce and handle foreclosures. The Boston Fed (bos.frb.org) has a bilingual page and downloadable pamphlet called ‘You may be paying too much for your mortgage’. The St Louis Fed (stlouisfed.org) has tabbed pages with links for consumers, financial institutions and community development professionals.

Most impressive is the ‘nonprime mortgage map’ on the Federal Reserve Bank of New York site (newyorkfed.org). This gets top billing on the home page and consists of a Flash-powered map of the US divided into states (you can also add cities and roads). It displays a formidable range of information. Charts for multiple views

The two basic modes are ‘current conditions’ and ‘six month change’. Within each you can choose first the loan type – subprime or Alt-A – and then one of 12 indicators. These range from the straightforward – loans per 1,000 housing units, share in foreclosure – to the technical: Median combined LTV, Share ARM resetting in 12 months.

On the current conditions map, the darker the colour the higher the number; on the change map, green means it’s got better, red it’s worsened, yellow no change. By running the cursor over the map, you can see the actual figure for each state (links also lead to an Excel spreadsheet of the underlying data and a glossary).

You can zoom in to get a county-by-county view and, while specific county numbers are not (at least yet) available, colour coding shows which is doing better and worse. So, for example, I can see that the state with most foreclosures is Florida, but within that Walton County is doing terribly while neighbouring Holmes County is hardly affected.

It seems to me that this map will be seriously useful for professionals of various sorts, but is also intriguing for the public. More generally, it shows just how good interactive maps are at displaying complex data.

Another example, which has been around for ages, is BP’s environmental mapping tool. This has six world maps, each illustrating a measure such as fresh water use and air emissions. Click to drill down, and you quickly get to a summary for each plant/site, with a link leading to detailed information. Colour coding is used to show background levels in different countries – for example, on the air emissions map China is dark green, while Australia is pale green.

Where America leads…

Back to central bank sites, and the rest of the world is lagging the US. As I’ve said before, there is a strange mismatch between the highly accessible background material on the Bank of England site and the lack of anything relating to the crisis except formal press releases. The European Central Bank has nothing on its home page, though it is flagging an online press conference by the president, which presumably might touch on the issues.

Sweden’s Riksbank got me excited with a notably engaging home page that included the headline ‘How do house prices affect the economy?’. The simply-written introduction lifted my expectations only for them to be sadly dashed when I started to read the document itself. Not surprisingly, given the source, it is an academic treatise written by economists.

Which is fine, but it does raise another interesting question for web managers: should an introduction to a document reflect the language within it? I would say that some simplification is okay, but a huge contrast such as this will simply encourage the wrong audience to open it, read a few sentences, and give up.

That’s it for now. The only thing I can be certain of is that this will be out of date by the time you read it.

First published on 01 October, 2008