Legal Commentary

Mark To Market

By Big Tent Democrat

James Kwak writes up the Financial Accounting Standards Board's (FASB) weakening of the "mark to market" rule. It's a good read. But as Kwak notes, investors won't be fooled by it. It does allow Geithner and the banks to play games with us though:

What if the function of these rule changes is to make it easier for banks to ignore the results of the PPIP auctions? For example, Bank A puts up a pool of loans for auction, but doesn’t like the winning bid and rejects it; Bank A doesn’t want to be forced to write down its loans to the amount of the winning bid. Or, alternatively, Bank B sells a security to a buyer, and Bank A holds the same security; Bank A doesn’t want to be forced to write down the security to the price of Bank B’s transaction.

I think it is more pernicious than that -- it allows "investors" to justify gambling taxpayer money (remember the non-recourse loans) and pay higher prices for the "legacy assets" than the market calls for. This is part of the Rube Goldberg contraption called the Geithner Plan to hand over a trillion dollars of taxpayer money to the financial industry.

Speaking for me only

Full post as published by TalkLeft on April 03, 2009 (boomark / email).