terms of the mortgage contract, CUSIP of the security, etc. One approach is for the appropriate
regulator to gather reports on all financial holdings by or against a given household by all
financial entities.11 The gold standard for information on financial positions – assets and
liabilities – is administrative data from universe of financial institutions, merged by household
for a subset of households. The universe of financial institutions would have to include
everything from hedge funds to payday lending to limited partnerships.12 Even if this is not
completely possible, it seems necessary to rely as much as possible on administrative data to
avoid significant loss in detail on holdings.
Could statistical agencies use private companies that serve households and collect
financial information, such as Mint.com? Data from these private money management
companies suffers from a serious shortcoming: the sample of the population they cover are not
representative of households in the United States. These data cover only households that choose
to manage their finances and do so on-line. Households that use these types of services are not