Feedback: Cheers for Research Office

Re: "Can New Data Agency Help Avert Next Crisis?" [Sept. 13]

We should all be rooting for the Office of Financial Research to succeed. There are good reasons to believe that it can.

As I observed last year at http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/corpgov/2009/07/11/identifying-and-deflating-asset-bubbles/, "government" collected the data needed to identify and deflate the twin bubbles in home prices and securities backed by subprime loans that precipitated the financial crisis, but no single government agency had access to all the data.

With the threshold requirement of data access satisfied, the office should be able to isolate instances in which asset-class pricing assumptions, which necessarily are based only on public data, are inconsistent with cogent office analysis of public and nonpublic data.