Weakening A Market Watchdog

WASHINGTON POST, 3/26/2009 by Arthur Levitt - Weakening A Market Watchdog: An Accounting Rule Change's Real Costs - Confidence, trust, and numbers that investors can believe in are the stuff that make or break the capital markets. When investors question the validity of numbers, they sell and wait, rather than buy and invest. ∴ Yet those charged with building confidence and trust and presenting numbers that can be believed are under sustained attack -- and they are losing. Over the past few weeks, banks and their supporters in Congress have applied significant pressure on the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) to rewrite standards for valuing distressed assets on bank balance sheets. Read the rest at the Washington Post...

H/t: John Detweiler
John says: This is obscure but important. Whatever happened to the accounting principle of "conservatism" -- the quality of judgment, to be exercised in the evaluation of business risks, which requires reasonable provisions for possible losses? Apparently the Congress wants us to close our eyes and through money into the stock market.