Accountants Gain Courage to Stand Up to Bankers: Jonathan Weil

[Joanne98]

July 23 (Bloomberg) -- Turns out America’s accounting poobahs have some fight in them after all.

Call them crazy, or maybe just brave. The Financial Accounting Standards Board is girding for another brawl with the banking industry over mark-to-market accounting. And this time, it’s the FASB that has come out swinging.

It was only last April that the FASB caved to congressional pressure by passing emergency rule changes so that banks and insurance companies could keep long-term losses from crummy debt securities off their income statements.

Now the FASB says it may expand the use of fair-market values on corporate income statements and balance sheets in ways it never has before. Even loans would have to be carried on the balance sheet at fair value, under a preliminary decision reached July 15. The board might decide whether to issue a formal proposal on the matter as soon as next month.

“They know they screwed up, and they took action to correct for it,” says Adam Hurwich, a partner at New York investment manager Jupiter Advisors LLC and a member of the FASB’s Investors Technical Advisory Committee. “The more pushback there’s going to be, the more their credibility is going to be established.”

Broad Consequences

The scope of the FASB’s initiative, which has received almost no attention in the press, is massive. All financial assets would have to be recorded at fair value on the balance sheet each quarter, under the board’s tentative plan.

This would mean an end to asset classifications such as held for investment, held to maturity and held for sale, along with their differing balance-sheet treatments. Most loans, for example, probably would be presented on the balance sheet at cost, with a line item below showing accumulated change in fair value, and then a net fair-value figure below that. For lenders, rule changes could mean faster recognition of loan losses, resulting in lower earnings and book values.

The board said financial instruments on the liabilities side of the balance sheet also would have to be recorded at fair-market values, though there could be exceptions for a company’s own debt or a bank’s customer deposits.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601039&sid=a5BsXz90CMso

I wonder how many of the "good" corporate earnings that just got reported would have been negative if the mark-to-mark rule had been kept in place?

[RUMMYisFROSTED]

1. "Call them crazy..."

:rofl: