公允价值会计外文文献翻译.docVIP

外文翻译 原文 Fair Value Accounting Material Source:financial services outlook Author: Peter J. Wallison Fair value accounting, introduced formally in 1993 by the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB), wasintended to make financial statements easier to compare and balance sheets more reflective of real values. Instead, as applied by accountants in the current credit crunch, it has been the principal cause of an unprecedented decline in asset values and an unprecedented rise in instability among financial institutions. The system has to be rethought, not only because of its contribution to financial instability but also because its procyclicality tends to create asset bubbles and exacerbate the effects of their collapse. This is an essay about accounting, but that is not a good reason to stop reading. It has been more than a year since the credit crisis began, and it is now becoming clear that accounting—specifically, what is called fair value accounting—is at the core of it. If you think accounting is simply a way of recording numbers, think again. Accounting is a highly conceptual art in which many objectives compete for priority. And as in politics, appearance is often the same thing as reality. The financial condition of a company may appear strong or weak depending on the accounting theory that is used to value its assets. Trillions of dollars in worldwide investor losses—and the immense losses perhaps still to come—testify to the power of accounting concepts to shape reality. A wide range of culprits has been implicated in the conventional analysis of today’s credit crisis. Subprime mortgage brokers unconcerned about the quality of their loans, subprime borrowers taking loans they knew they could not repay, sloppy underwriting by lenders, condo-flippers hoping to sell their properties before the mortgage reset, impenetrably complex securitized instruments created by financial whiz kids, poor rating agency models,shoddy risk management at banks, laziness o