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LendingTree is the leading online lending and realty services exchange that empowers consumers - When Banks Compete, You Win.

Credit card companies are canceling your account. Student loans, home mortgages, and auto loans are all getting harder to obtain, and the big bank where I have an account is insolvent; how about yours?

Starting today, a range of next-generation financial services companies, all of whom employ technology in innovative ways, have teamed up to market some much-needed help to consumers with the Uncrunch America campaign. Like a team of of financial Superfriends, Lending Club offers personal loans through a peer-to-peer model, Virgin Money (yes, a pro-social for-profit offshoot of the Branson empire) has peer-to-peer mortgage financing, OnDeck Capital offers small business loans with a proprietary holistic scoring model, CreditKarma has credit score tools, and Geezeo offers personal finance and budgeting tools.Since the beginning of the year, UnCrunch members have lent almost $75 million to one another.

The site has an overwhelmingly grassroots, patriotic feeling and look, as though it were a stray page from MoveOn.org or recovery.gov. "The American people will solve the credit crisis by helping each other," it proclaims.

Does this fine-sounding premise hold up? Peer-to-peer lending is one of the oldest ideas in finance. In its online incarnation, it doesn't have anything like the volume yet to fill the trillion-dollar gap in the consumer credit market. But it does offer an intriguing alternative to the standard profit-happy credit model, and it's been spreading as a close cousin of the microfinance or social lending movement. As a niche both for borrowers shut out of the credit market and for investors looking for a better return than the stock market can offer, it's likely to grow.

On the morning of March 29, 1933, dozens of reporters filed into the Oval Office for a press conference with the new president. Franklin Roosevelt had taken office earlier that month amid the greatest economic crisis the US had seen: 5,700 banks had failed, 25 percent of the country was unemployed, and more than half of all mortgages were in default.

Hope for a recovery was dim; the public had lost faith in the entire financial system. The number of American investors had exploded, from a few hundred thousand before 1916 to more than 16 million. Yet few of them understood the investments they held, many of which had proven to be junk. Supposedly sound companies were exposed as pyramid schemes. Of the $50 billion in securities sold in the previous decade, half had become worthless.

And yet, as reporters huddled around his desk, Roosevelt sounded confident. "I have something on the Securities Bill today," he announced. That day, members of his brain trust were on Capitol Hill, submitting a plan that would spark the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission. One overriding concept lay at the center of the legislation: transparency. Louis Brandeis, before becoming a Supreme Court justice, had written an exposé of the financial system for Harper's Weekly, and one passage in particular had lodged in Roosevelt's brain: "Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants. Electric lights the most efficient policeman." The proposed bill would require, for the first time, companies to file detailed accounts of their financial health and activity, and bankers would have to report their fees and commissions. As Roosevelt explained it to the reporters around him, the bill "applies the new doctrine of caveat vendor in place of the old doctrine of caveat emptor. In other words, 'Let the seller beware as well as the buyer.' In other words, there is a definite, positive burden on the seller for the first time to tell the truth."

Now, here we are again, 76 years later, facing another crisis of trust that threatens the entire financial system. This time, the issue is no longer a lack of transparency. Since the 1933 Securities Bill, corporate America has been required to disclose a deluge of information in a multitude of ways—10-Ks and 10-Qs, earnings calls and Sarbanes-Oxley-mandated 404s. Between 1996 and 2005 alone, the federal government issued more than 30 major rules requiring new financial disclosure protocols, and the data has piled up. The SEC's public document database, Edgar, now catalogs 200 gigabytes of filings each year—roughly 15 million pages of text—up from 35 gigabytes a decade ago.

But the volume of data obscures more than it reveals; financial reporting has become so transparent as to be invisible. Answering what should be simple questions—how secure is my cash account? How much of my bank's capital is tied up in risky debt obligations?—often seems to require a legal degree, as well as countless hours to dig through thousands of pages of documents. Undoubtedly, the warning signs of our current crisis—and the next one!—lie somewhere in all those filings, but good luck finding them.

Even the regulators can't keep up. A Senate study in 2002 found that the SEC had managed to fully review just 16 percent of the nearly 15,000 annual reports that companies submitted in the previous fiscal year; the recently disgraced Enron hadn't been reviewed in a decade. We shouldn't be surprised. While the SEC is staffed by a relatively small group of poorly compensated financial cops, Wall Street bankers get paid millions to create new and ever more complicated investment products. By the time regulators get a handle on one investment class, a slew of new ones have been created. "This is a cycle that goes on and on—and will continue to get repeated," says Peter Wysocki, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management. "You can't just make new regulations about the next innovation in financial misreporting."

That's why it's not enough to simply give the SEC—or any of its sister regulators—more authority; we need to rethink our entire philosophy of regulation. Instead of assigning oversight responsibility to a finite group of bureaucrats, we should enable every investor to act as a citizen-regulator. We should tap into the massive parallel processing power of people around the world by giving everyone the tools to track, analyze, and publicize financial machinations. The result would be a wave of decentralized innovation that can keep pace with Wall Street and allow the market to regulate itself—naturally punishing companies and investments that don't measure up—more efficiently than the regulators ever could.

The revolution will be powered by data, which should be unshackled from the pages of regulatory filings and made more flexible and useful. We must require public companies and all financial firms to report more granular data online—and in real time, not just quarterly—uniformly tagged and exportable into any spreadsheet, database, widget, or Web page. The era of sunlight has to give way to the era of pixelization; only when we give everyone the tools to see each point of data will the picture become clear. Just as epidemiologists crunch massive data sets to predict disease outbreaks, so will investors parse the trove of publicly available financial information to foresee the next economic disasters and opportunities.

The time to act is now. An exhaustive study by the Transparency Policy Project at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government—analyzing disclosure rules for everything from restaurant cleanliness to SUV rollover risk—found that there's a very brief window after any calamity for government to institute changes. (Wait too long and the special interests start regaining their confidence and pushing back.) In the financial world, the old order is still trying to find its new shape. So the window is, briefly, cracked. Caveat vendor.