Still kowtowing to Big Business

I wrote earlier this week how hopeful I was because German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicholas Sarkozy were so adamant about and pushing for true change and strong regulation, worldwide, of financial markets and now this, today--it seems the US' Financial Accounting Standards Board buckled to political pressure from bankers and their toady Congresspersons.

Bankers didn't like that so much of their assets, on their books, are so much lower in value because of this current banking crisis/fiasco. Regulations, up to now, said values of their mortgages and products would have to be whatever the real market value was.

That made sense.

Values of their products shouldn't be arbitrary, of course.

So, now that there's such a big financial crisis and everything has gone to heck, including and especially bank's assets and their values on the stock markets, they want to say that these assets are actually worth much more--in a "regular" market, which of course, this isn't.

This is insanity.

The government now, with this ruling by Congresspeople, has made it possible for the bankers to decide what the value of their assets are.

I ask you, is this not insanity?

The market no longer rules. It's not "supply and demand" deciding the value of a product. It's the banker themselves.

For some sanity, let's quote the Investors Working Group and 2 former SEC Chairmen who lead it, from their statement on this travesty:

"In order to create high-quality accounting standards, it is critical that the process be independent and free from political pressure... To the extent that these new FASB proposals reduce the free flow of transparent and reliable financial information, they undermine investor interests and weaken their ability to make sound investment decisions."

And that's the least of it. That's incredibly understated.

This is exactly the opposite of the stronger, smarter and more stringent accounting methods we should be developing right now, so we avoid big financial failures and crises in the future.

This makes us look, further, like a Third World banana republic and not responsible at all.