Archive for the ‘mark to market’ tag
Mark To Market accounting Relaxed…has anything really changed?
So now companies have the same assets, but they will look different on the balance sheets of companies like banks with ‘distessed’ assets. The stock market has already discounted for these assets with their own valuation models so the fact that these changes will now be reflected on the actual balance sheets will not really change anything although it is good for a ‘pop’ today in the market. This change was expected to happen so this is not exactly a shock and might have a limited effect on the market considering how much time the market had to rally before this announcement.
Detaching regulatory capital requirements from Mark to Market
Massive government interaction is definitely the most inefficient way to run a market. Instead of just detaching capital requirements from mark to market and allowing the banks to use mark to model for regulatory reasons and maintain mark to market for reporting, as mentioned by Karen Finerman on CNBC’s Fast Money mentioned as I had been wondering myself even before I heard from Karen the seemingly obvious alternative to the capital requirements problem.If the reason the assets need to be bought by the PIPP program is because the banks need more capital in order to lend, then change the system for capital requirements.
The mark to market accounting controversy
About mark to market, talked about on squawk box on 10-29-08:

