If you are looking to buy a holiday present for an accountant, then you should consider Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance. It's a pretty fast read – both for its moderate length (256 pages) and…
Hewlett Packard Co. claims they were 'misled' (to put it mildly) by accounting 'misstatements' (to put it mildly) into overpaying, on the order of $8 billion, to acquire Autonomy. But, if anybody outside of HP has precise knowledge of those…
The author of this post is Annie Schedrin of the London-based organization Accounting for International Development (AfID). It seems like they do good work where it is much needed. I am always hopeful that educators will share my posts with…
The Mary Schapiro era at the SEC is coming to an end without, despite herculean efforts, having moved the ball forward on IFRS convergence. The final denouement was the departure of Chief Accountant James Kroeker on the day before the…
The purpose of this post is to review a recently published monograph authored by former FASB Chair Dennis Beresford. To summarize, it supports the status quo for money market funds, and I want to explain why I think the reasoning…
We have been covering loan impairment for the past few weeks, and the FASB's proposals leave me with the feeling that we will be discussing it for a long time to come. Once the FASB shoves its post-WWI-Germany-derived "Current Expected…
In my previous post, I committed to providing a statement of my own accounting principles with newer readers of this blog in mind. I am also adding a few observations about what the process of standard setting has come to…
Tom I'm [Osman Sattar,] a relatively new reader to your blog and I understand that you favour market values in accounting. In this article, you say that: (1) "[B]oth models [the current incurred loss model and the proposed CECL model]…
In response to my previous post, Edith Orenstein (author of the FEI blog and fellow Ohio State alum) asked me whether I preferred the status quo "incurred," or the proposed "expected" loan loss model (CECL). Also in that post, I…
At its August 22nd meeting, the FASB came to some significant tentative conclusions regarding the recognition and measurement of loans: "The Board decided that the model [of loan loss measurement] should utilize a measurement objective of "expected credit losses" and…