Last Thursday, a new reader (who prefers to remain anonymous) wrote: "Have you considered addressing the hotly debated issue of how assets sold into the TARP [Troubled Asset Relief Program] will be accounted for by banks, and whether the prices…
While most politicians in Washington were trying to figure out how to solve the current financial crisis with real cash, my congressman*, John Shadegg (Rep. - Arizona), and a few of his colleagues have been fiddling with accounting rules while Rome burns.…
A member of the AECM listserv reported that today's episode of "60 Minutes" explained that a credit default swap (CDS) "was actually an insurance instrument, and perhaps fraudulently sold as [a] financial instrument to avoid insurance regulations and insurance regulators."…
If you took a look at the House Bill that went down in flames today, you might have caught Congress fiddling with GAAP as Rome burned. See Section 132 of the bill proposed to empower the SEC to suspend application of FAS…
In the current environment, I am an ardent supporter of those who would resist calls to suspend fair value accounting rules. But, when I was at the SEC, I had a front-row seat on what was perhaps one of the…
[Click here for the 2012 version.] Now that the SEC has proposed its "roadmap" for jettisoning US GAAP in favor of IFRS, critics are finally starting to build momentum. Charles Niemeier, outgoing PCAOB board member, delivered a brilliant critique of the SEC's…
Earlier this month, Compliance Week published an article entitled, "Related-Party Transactions Bane of China's IFRS." I had been generally aware that China's eagerness to fully embrace IFRS had been tempered by its reluctance to furnish the required related party disclosures…
With the SEC's publication of their proposed roadmap for the U.S. adoption of IFRS, all of the press coverage I have been reading has focused on the big picture. (As usual, Floyd Norris's is among the best.) But in the…
A couple of posts ago, I wrote about the SEC's project for revamping the reserves disclosures made by oil and gas companies. In particular, I focused on appropriate prices to be used for measuring the value of recognized reserves. Notwithstanding…
It's one thing to rely on misleading financial statements and invest in a company that soon thereafter goes bankrupt; and quite another to invest in a hip replacement operation that turns out badly because your doctor had misleading information concerning…