Reactions to the recent Accounting Standards Update on financial instruments are rolling in. Start with this one from Bloomberg/Businessweek: Banks including Bank of America Corp., based in Charlotte, North Carolina, and San Francisco-based Wells Fargo & Co. already report the fair value of their loans in the footnotes of their quarterly reports to regulators. Bank [...] Read more > >
The FASB has just issued a long-awaited, and much-debated, Exposure Draft of a Proposed Accounting Standards Update (ASU) that would dramatically change the accounting for financial instruments. As noted in a press release (full text available here): Among other changes, the proposed ASU would seek to bring more transparency into financial statements by incorporating both [...] Read more > >
You probably noticed we haven’t had a round table for a little while. We will continue with this hiatus for at least a few more weeks, as I am traveling throughout much of June, and Jeffrey is making the transition back from Norwalk to civilian life. We’ll start up later in the summer, and plan [...] Read more > >
Certain transactions are inherently difficult to account for. Investments in illiquid financial instruments may be impossible to value without heavy reliance on unverifiable assumptions from management. Transactions that include explicit or implicit rights of return must be recorded as sales or as a bundle of options, neither of which is quite accurate. Transactions with customers [...] Read more > >
In case you haven’t already seen it elsewhere, the FASB website and Bob Herz’s testimony last Friday before the House Subcommittee on Capital Markets, Insurance, and Government Sponsored Enterprises both contain Bob Herz’s earlier (April 19) letter to Congressman Barney Frank that discusses accounting standards and the Lehman Bankruptcy report. Not surprisingly, I found it [...] Read more > >
I was talking about a recent regulatory failure with my wife last night (yes, we talk about such things), and we agreed that the truth would surely come out eventually, as uncertainties resolved. That led me to utter the pithy remark “Time is the best auditor.” My wife asked “who said that,” and I realized [...] Read more > >
In a May 2010 Harvard Business Review article, Dana Carney (assistant professor at Columbia University) answers questions about her research that examines the relationship between a sense of power and the ability to deceive others. Although I highly recommend reading the actual paper (which is very well written, I might add), let me summarize the basics [...] Read more > >
IN THE MONEY: FASB Readies Proposal On Fair Value For Loans By Michael Rapoport A DOW JONES NEWSWIRES COLUMN 996 words 17 May 2010 15:27 Dow Jones News Service DJ English (c) 2010 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. NEW YORK (Dow Jones)–The battle over whether to expand the use of controversial “fair-value” accounting is about [...] Read more > >
Signed up to attend the FASB/IASB update on Sunday at the AAA in San Francisco. For the last many years, probably 10, i have attended and it’s a HUGE benefit to me in my teaching and research. I get up to speed in a very efficient way, and i hear it straight from those who [...] Read more > >
Signed up to attend the FASB/IASB update on Sunday at the AAA in San Francisco. For the last many years, probably 10, i have attended and it’s a HUGE benefit to me in my teaching and research. I get up to speed in a very efficient way, and i hear it straight from those who [...] Read more > >