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There are liquidity, jurisdiction and tax considerations that go into bond accounting. Under both US GAAP and IFRS you can't flip between held to maturity, avai
by revel 4y ago
There are liquidity, jurisdiction and tax considerations that go into bond accounting. Under both US GAAP and IFRS you can't flip between held to maturity, available for sale and m2m asset classification advantageously. I think this is ok -- it's impractical and misleading for a bank to value every liability and asset by rebaselining value constantly. How would you determine fair value for a bespoke security anyway? No matter what you did it would be largely guesswork anyway. This change would make banks more difficult to value and increase volatility since performance would be even more heavily driven by market conditions. In my opinion, accounting statements aren't really the right place for the kind of disclosure you're looking for.
The Basel accords are supposed to establish a risk-oriented way of measuring and controlling capital risk limits across asset classes. SVB and other regional banks fought heavily against being subject to this kind of oversight. I think it makes more sense to rework Basel 4 based on this failure rather than change the accounting standards.
- kmod 4y agoMany types of institutions have to mark to market on a ~constant basis, so it's not impossible. Yes there are certain asset classes (private companies, for example) that don't have easy or reliable marks (but people still do it anyway!). But at least for SVB the issue was not determining the market value, but that the market value was bad.