It’s hard to pick which of the major accounting standards convergence projects has given investors the shortest shrift. But leases is notable for one thing: the FASB’s handpicked Investor Advisory Committee (IAC) panned the FASB’s proposals, and then were completely ignored.…
“I do not deny that what happened to us is a thing worth laughing at. But it is not worth telling, for not everyone is sufficiently intelligent to be able to see things from the right point of view.” —…
The FASB is now 40 years old, and its lease accounting standards are about the same age. Some would say that SFAS 13 was obsolete when issued, but it only became a front-burner topic for the FASB about a decade…
An excerpt from a WSJ blog: "Outgoing FASB Chairman Leslie Seidman has had plenty of time to tackle long-standing questions about whether accounting principles are more desirable than specific accounting rules, writes Emily Chasan. The debate over whether detailed rules…
This post could turn out to be a little dry. So, to whet your curiosity, I'll start with the payoff: First, contrary to the conclusions of the FASB and IASB, level periodic lease expense does not reflect the unerlying economics of…
This may be a little hard to explain, but my thoughts went to lease accounting after reading Jonathan Weil's Bloomberg piece about the JPMorgan derivatives debacle. And, it happened again after I read Floyd Norris's piece in NYT about the…
In the good old days, you recognized the assets you owned. For the reasons why things eventually became a lot more complicated than that, there is plenty of blame to go around. Blame the banks and their minions of financial…