Actually they don't report their individual positions on trades or often their liability very well as illustrated in the Atlantic's article last year "What's In

Actually they don't report their individual positions on trades or often their liability very well as illustrated in the Atlantic's article last year "What's Inside America's Banks?"[1]. Banks file the usual annual reports as do other companies but the have a very different business model involving a lot of risk management and do not report their individual positions, derivative contracts, etc. Even the bank CEO's themselves can be quite surprised by what positions their bank is taking even like JP Morgan Chase which is supposed to be one of the better managed banks [2]. Reporting them in real time would be infeasible but some sort of delayed reporting to a website or other entity would allow third parties to see who is actually managing their risk. Personally I don't think you're going to have regulations that scale to keep up with the banks so what does scale other than the markets regulating them? As far as I know most efficient market theory rests on transparency. [1] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/01/whats-inside-americas-banks/309196/?single_page=true http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/01/whats-in... [2] http://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanvardi/2013/09/18/jamie-dimon-and-jpmorgan-try-to-escape-the-london-whale/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanvardi/2013/09/18/jamie-dim...