And it was the cosy, crony capitalism practised by the overseas Chinese, with its murky accounting and bank loans for friends, that allowed so many Asian firms to over-borrow and get into their current mess.
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The accepted practice in bank accounting is to set up significant loan-loss reserves only when the commitment is availed of and the arrangement becomes an on-balance-sheet loan.
The Treasury bought preferred stock in over 700 banks to give them an additional capital cushion, while mortgage backed securities and mark to market accounting were wiping bank capital out.
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Even by the government's optimistic accounting, only Bank of China currently meets the standards set by the Bank for International Settlements, which thinks big banks should have capital equal to at least 8% of their assets.
Another option is small business bank accounting.
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The news this morning is that allegations of accounting fictions at Deutsche Bank are now a hot-button issue at the SEC.
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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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Value has to be measured relative to something such as earnings, revenues, cash in the bank, or accounting book value.
Last month came revelations of suspect accounting practices at Nippon Credit Bank, which hid massive losses in dummy companies.
They proposed mark to market accounting, not only for bank holdings of securities, but of loans as well indeed, the whole balance sheet.
Widening borrowing costs, accounting rules that forced the bank to write down its assets, and rating agency downgrades that all conspired to hobble Lehman.
Wang Liming, a former accounting officer at China Construction Bank, worked with others to steal 20 million yuan from the bank using fake papers.
MICs are not simply the best but also the biggest customers of the World Bank accounting for 63% of its loans and over half of its administrative budget.
For starters, any combination might change the bank's favorable accounting for its stake in the brokerage.
Still, consumer loans, accounting for 63% of the bank's total loans, grew 22% in the recent quarter.
What an activist-minded Treasury chief and the SEC should do is make sure that bank regulators and the accounting profession don't overreact.
The bank as a whole would be turning a handsome profit were it not weighed down by an ailing investment bank and by nonsensical accounting rules that force banks to take losses on their own debt when their credit ratings improve.
These include reforms that would affect bank regulators, supervisors and accounting standard-setters, and cover bankers' pay, derivatives trading and rating agencies.
After questioning Citi for, among other things, its accounting pratices Mayo was blackballed by the bank which denied him access to executives.
But other analysts were wary because the draft lacked detailed instructions on bank reform, tax and accounting issues, and on how bad loans would be reduced.
Britain's corporate taxes are in fact not all that high, according to a study by the World Bank and PricewaterhouseCoopers, an accounting firm, which looks at the percentage of earnings that companies pay overall (including labour taxes).
In one case that my partner and I worked many years ago at a regional bank, this premise was illustrated when an elderly depositor called the bank to report an apparent accounting error of about twenty dollars in interest in her IRS 1099 for her two Certificates of Deposit.
When a loan is written off, its accounting value is reduced to zero so the bank can suffer no further losses.
It is paying for this partly by selling oil deposits to the firm and partly by more accounting sleight of hand involving the National Development Bank (BNDES).
Debevoise deployed 100 lawyers and 110 support staff who billed 582, 000 hours, while Deloitte put 1, 300 staff members on the job, who worked 949, 000 hours searching 40 million bank documents and reviewing 127 million accounting records.
As I railed over and over in blogs, speeches and TV appearances prior to April 2009, the strict application of mark to market accounting to banks had a devastating impact on bank capital during the early stages of the financial crisis.
They are regulated by the SEC and bank authorities and audited by major national accounting firms.
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Potential political and regulatory changes, social unrest, poverty, fall-out from troubled bank loans, inadequate financial controls, accounting irregularities, and an overheated real estate market are looming as big issues.
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Keeping an eye on her bank account is what drove Saniewska to study accounting, leaving photography to become an amateur pursuit for a while.
In 2008-09 already troubled U.S. banks were being battered by a recently reenacted, arcane accounting rule that was gratuitously destroying the book value of bank capital.
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