Fair-Value Fight in Finance Making Volcker Rue FASB Dissonance
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A dispute between U.S. and international accounting groups about how to value financial instruments is threatening to derail efforts to converge global standards, affecting how trillions of dollars of assets are marked on bank balance sheets.
The debate pits the U.S. Financial Accounting Standards Board, which wants to expand the use of fair-value accounting to all financial assets, including loans and deposits, against the London-based International Accounting Standards Board, which opposes such a wide usage. The outcome also will determine how much capital banks have to hold to meet new rules.