Personally, it would have made a lot more sense to completely scrape these accounting regulations. The "does not exist" phrase is too restrictive, as few markets are completely absent. This from the Washington Post.
The Securities and Exchange Commission and the Financial Accounting Standards Board have just made an announcement that, dry as it sounds, may mean a great deal: "When an active market for a security does not exist, the use of management estimates that incorporate current market participant expectations of future cash flows, and include appropriate risk premiums, is acceptable." . . .
Simply put, mark-to-market accounting requires companies to set the value for the assets they own at the price they could fetch on the open market right now. The prices must be "marked to market;" hence the phrase.
What does that have to do with the current crisis? The root problem now is that financial institutions have been caught holding value-less, or "toxic," assets on their books, such as the mortgage-backed securities based on sub-prime mortgages that have defaulted.
The government believes that those assets will be worth something soon -- that's why they want to buy them in the $700 billion Wall Street rescue plan. But under mark-to-market rules currently required, they are worth almost nothing, threatening those who hold them with insolvency. . . .
The SEC (very) partially solves the mark-to-market accounting rule problems
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Oleh
abudzar
