Dave Lindorff, Politicizing Accounting

The accounting profession might seem like the last place that you’d find serious political hanky-panky going on, and it’s probably not on very many people’s A-list of fun subjects to read about, but the Financial Accounting Standards Board, a quasi-governmental body that has statutory authority to regulate and establish the rules by which public companies, including banks, do their books, has just caved in to pressure from those banks and from the large number of members of Congress who pocket huge piles of campaign swag and perks from those banks and other public companies, and gravely undermined the integrity of corporate balance sheets.

This may sound incredibly arcane, but what the FASB has done is declare that assets held by companies (including banks) on their books will no longer have to be valued at their current market value. Under new guidelines, effective retroactively to March 15, these assets can now be valued at what the corporate managers think (or pretend to think) they will be worth at some time in the future when they might try to sell them.