In regard to changing any of the regulations of GAAP…it’s not really necessary. What we currently have isn’t enforced anyway. Not withstanding Madoff’s confession, nobody has been found guilty of doing anything wrong with our current rules of law.

Can you believe that? What fucking Country do we live in? I can’t believe it. We are sending our taxes to a bunch of thieves. I remember 30 years ago when we used to bad-mouth the earnings and accounting standards of other Countries and we used to just gloat about how much better and honest our reported numbers were. Well, you can forget all that. You couldn’t sell that concept to the biggest idiot living on Mars now. We already know the numbers aren’t worth the paper they are written on and haven’t even looked at the numbers yet! Don’t waste your time on changing FASB, it doesn’t make a shit what the LAW says!!

Baudelaire said it best:
“N’étant plus contenu que par le regard de ses dignes compagnons, il se livrèrent aux excès furieux d’une gaité mensongère, fille du libertinage et du rhum.”

Being freed from the inquisitive looks of the upstanding citizens, the rascals delved without contrition unto the excesses of lust and liquor.

Excess and debauch are things common sense and logic particularly abhor and our banksters adore.

No worries then.

The finance/banking sector will rarely invoke this power – using it only when they have royally effed us and the economy and they need an escape clause that allows the companies to keep operating (paying large bonuses and paying bondholders in full) as if they weren’t bankrupt. This will allow the problem to continue growing until the government panics and, on the advice of the finance/banking sector, provides a rapid and total bailout.

Obviously, such a situation is a laughably remote possibility in the U.S.

We should instead be trying to deal with the already present problem of the overregulation which has been stifling innovation in finance. Sure, the minor tweaks in regulations over the past 25+ years have allowed the finance sector to increase its share of U.S. corporate profits from 10% at the start of the Reagan years to 34% in the Bush II years, but, with REAL innovation, the finance sector ought to be able to grab something meaningful – say 80% of U.S. corporate profits.

Then we’d all have to agree with Barry that those hefty bonuses were well earned.

This is somewhat of an oxymoron. If the FASB has accounting rules that could be a “threat” to financial stability, then the problem would appear to reside with the discipline of accounting. How dare those damn accountants create rules that could threaten financial stablity!

I suspect however, that the problem does not lie with accounting nor their rules, but rather that by following sound principles and practices of accounting, the threat to financial stability will become apparant in the risky activities of TBTF entities.