Based on fair-value accounting rules, Goldman forced lower fire-sale marks on the industry which put some financial institutions out of business almost overnight.
This is entirely legitimate under the liberal gain-on-sale accounting permitted today.
The most sought-after professions were engineering, medicine, accounting and--hang on to your fountain pens!
If you think the new accounting rules for mark-to-market accounting caused havoc on bank balance sheets and accelerated the crisis, then this would have been far worse.
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If crises can hit us at any moment for no reason, and not because, say, governments impose self-reinforcing down-spiral accounting rules on the banks, then it is easier to believe that we should spend our time figuring out ways to mitigate the inevitable consequences rather than trying to prevent what cannot be prevented.
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Cox has the authority to override the Financial Accounting Standards Board's insane insistence on mark-to-market accounting rules, but he has done nothing.
But this doesn't mean that an Enronesque collapse is imminent or even that its business--advising companies on computer installations, including accounting systems--is weak.
Your five-year return-on-equity figure for HSBC is based on U.K. accounting standards, which are not comparable to the U.S. accounting standards used by Citigroup.
An attributional accounting protocol that relies on facilities-level GHG balances to report net CO2 uptake and track otherwise unregulated GHG emissions throughout fuel and feedstock supply chains.
The figures are a set of financial records for the entire UK public sector, from 1 April 2009 to 31 March 2010 - under the previous Labour government - based on commercial accounting principles.
That plus market-to-market accounting, no short uptick rule, and no ban on naked short-selling, led to the avalanche.
For instance, the recent guideline on fair-value accounting, which decrees that companies must show equity holdings at their market value, also contains a provision that allows them to avoid writing down shares if they think that they will soon recover in value.
As hardly any of them do immunise their stock-option programmes (by buying equal and offsetting options), and were therefore exposed to rising share prices, their true profits, on a full-cost accounting measure, were only 37% of those published, according to Smithers.
He says that a top-four accounting firm, who declined to be named, has already given the go-ahead on the new financing.
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And not every public-accounting flaw is to the benefit of governments: their right to tax is not recognised on balance-sheets, for example.
For many people, the health-plan tax break is more valuable than the highly popular mortgage-interest deduction on Schedule A, says Kelly Davis, an employee-benefits specialist at accounting firm CliftonLarsonAllen.
One reason may be accounting changes which make pension-fund managers more focused on the short term.
The American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) has objected to the IRS plan, complaining of undue burdens on small and medium-sized accounting firms.
Filipowski started with a small outfit that produced software for IBM mainframes, then went on to found an accounting and inventory-data software company called Platinum Technology.
The bureaucrats' side was showcased at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and Public Company Accounting Oversight Board roundtable hearing last week on Sarbanes-Oxley's section 404.
BP, for example, had a disappointing Q2 where production fell, while Exxon Mobil cranked out profits that were based on one-time items and accounting moves.
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As planned, in the fourth quarter of 2012 the company recognized revenue from four months of Payments transactions for accounting reasons detailed in our Form 10-Q filed on October 24, 2012.
Spitzer's case is focusing on a few arcane areas of accounting--including an allegedly bogus deal by AIG with General Re, a unit of Berkshire Hathaway, to bulk up AIG's balance sheet.
They can carry five to 20 times more current in the same unit area while reducing the amount of energy lost as heat by 75-97% (depending on whether the current is alternating or direct), even after accounting for all the nitrogen-cooling paraphernalia.
The FASB itself is working on a "conceptual framework" of accounting--sort of an accounting constitution.
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Merck is being accused of playing games with its books based on an accounting strategy used by its Merck-Medco pharmacy benefits arm.
Changes are required in the VC industry to include alternate fund structures, improved performance measures, standardized data reporting, and a focus on long-term results by reconsidering accounting rule FAS 157.
Never mind that the route to Italy's delightful balance-sheet is not quite what ultra-fastidious German and Dutch zealots might have liked too many one-off measures and accounting tricks, too much reliance on tax rises.
Now company lawyers have targets on their backs, given accounting requirements under Sarbanes-Oxley, foreign bribery and other corporate skullduggery.
This debt bias is based on the accounting rationale that interest is a tax-deductible cost of doing business while dividends are a non-deductible form of business income.
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