Tag: Accounting

Why Client No. 9 Can Seek Office No. 3

I think I speak for a lot of New Yorkers when I ask this question: Is Eliot Spitzer the best we can do?

Seriously, we can’t find another candidate who hasn’t shamed public office with what he admits was “horrendous” behavior in which he “lied?”

It’s not that Mr. Spitzer isn’t gifted. His work as New York attorney general from 1999 to 2006 was one of the most dynamic in the history of the job. He took on Wall Street’s questionable dealings, was a true maverick and thumbed his nose at Washington regulators who had become inured to Wall Street practices.

When the public interest aligns with Mr. Spitzer’s political ambition, the results can be spectacular.

But does Mr. Spitzer, who earned the nickname “Client No. 9” in a humiliating prostitution scandal, deserve a second political life?

Why would anyone ask such a question since Bill Clinton made a sex scandal a badge of honor?

Consider Mr. Stringer. On the one hand, he has been a relatively faithful city politician. He championed the Second Avenue subway, bike lanes and women’s rights. He took a controversial stand against hydraulic fracking. His scandals have been garden variety: use of taxpayer funds for travel and the like.

But Mr. Stringer doesn’t produce much in the way of headlines. Many New Yorkers probably don’t know who he is.

Who?

This New Yorker is looking forward to hearing more about gardening.

many may be tempted to vote for Kristin Davis, the Wall Street madam who is running and was accused of supplying Mr. Spitzer with his trysts.

http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat…

When my sister and her husband owned a motel [no, not at all the kind of motel rented by the hour], I was more than a little fascinated to learn the aging spinster-looking lady talking business with my sister was the local madam.

Not since Charles Bronson played a serial killer accountant has there even been remotely such fun in accounting.

Best,  Terry

Want to see Blankfein’s head on a metaphorical pike?  Want accountability?  Justice?

It’s called “mark-to-market” accounting.

Listen to Ilargi:  

It’s perfectly defensible for a government to lend money to a bank in trouble that is important to its economy, in order to try and save. However, it borders on criminal negligence, if it isn’t outright criminal behavior, to lend that money without being perfectly aware of what assets that bank holds.

A bank could have 100 times more debt than it receives in bail-out money. But we wouldn’t know about that today, we’re not allowed to know. Both the US (FASB 157) and the European Union (IFRS 9) have accounting (non-)principles in place that say it’s perfectly alright for a financial institution to hold assets in its books at 100 cents on the dollar that have a market value of 70% of that, or 50%, or even 5%. It has therefore no obligation to reveal even to its shareholders what its true financial situation is.

Fraudulent accounting is why banks pass stress tests with flying colors then implode weeks later.  We’re dumping money into black holes.  If the banks want to take our money, they have to mark all their assets to market value.  Mark-to-fantasy accounting is, as Ilargi says, “criminal.”  And a total waste of taxpayer funded bailout money, a never-ending money pit.

Mark-to-market is instant karma.

…a bank should never ever be allowed to sit on its debt and mark it to fantasy and then also receive funding from our governments, whether in bail-outs, hand-outs, loans, special facilities’ windows at our central banks, or any other sort of funding, nothing of the kind.

We need to tell our politicians that they can no longer give even one single penny of ours to any institution that hasn’t marked all of its assets to market. No exceptions.

Let the sun shine on these blood-sucking freaks.  It couldn’t happen to nicer people.