Thursday, May 29, 2008

They Don't Want This Information to Get Out

In doing the research for the book I thought it would be a jim dandy chart to have showing what percent of mortgages made were done on a "no doc" or "low doc" basis. So after much scrummaging around I finally found the data series. The data series was provided by a company called FirstAmerican CoreLogic.

Phenomenal data.

AMAZING DATA!


Hat tip to them and their work.


Oh, the charts I could make!


Unfortunately they wouldn't let me use the data because presumably my book spoke ill of the banking industry.


Meanwhile I have a chart, a beautiful chart, sitting right on my laptop that would be the envy of all charts, that I can't use showing the percent of loans that were no doc and low doc.


But neither can the New York Federal Reserve. Previously the NY Fed had the same data series up on their web site, but was requested to take it down.





This angers me, because whereas I understand proprietary information, when does it become public information, or just information that society at large has a right to know? Plus, what is the fight to prevent this information from getting out? Like the banks' reputation can get worse????

In any case, I would be eternally grateful if somebody out there knows someplace I can get this information that isn't sourced to FirstAmerican. Any econ grad student out there that happens to be studying this or knows of somebody that might have an idea on where to get this info, I will name my new dog after you.

And that is quite the honor because I like dogs more than children.

In the meantime, check out this link to the NY Fed where you can toy around with different subprime figures and play with some charty goodness.
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4 comments:

  1. Anonymous8:50 PM

    Uh, they can't copyright facts. The only way they can control you is if you signed an agreement when using/viewing the data.

    (Note: I don't know if there is some "trade secrets" rule. An NDA might or might not cover such a circumstance. IANL.)

    In any case, I wonder if you could pull a b.s. excuse of "if I could show you the data, it might look like this" and put up a chart approximating the data.

    (That mortgage map still shows the percentage of no-docs and low-docs, but did you want something more specific?)

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  2. Anonymous9:12 PM

    Oh, wait, I think you want the historical low doc data. That could take a while to find.

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  3. Anonymous9:46 PM

    I think this is what you want:

    http://www.newyorkfed.org/regional/historicaldata_abs_alta.html

    (Sourced from an MSN search cache.)

    Only the State data can be downloaded. County and MSA files are empty/blank.

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  4. Captain Capitalism10:41 AM

    Yeah, that only has December's data. I have the old spreadsheet with the historical information, I need another source aside from FirstAmerican.

    ReplyDelete