Sept. 20 (Bloomberg) -- You don’t often see Washington
regulators publicly raising alarms about banks’ accounting
practices. That’s why a speech this week by the comptroller of
the currency, Thomas Curry, deserves more attention.
The way Curry described the situation, you get the sense
that some banks’ numbers may be too good to be true. He made
clear he wasn’t warning about an imminent crisis. Yet he
cautioned that some banks seemed to have been “scrimping on
their allowances against their loan losses,” which is a fancy
way of saying they may be fudging their numbers.