CONFIDENCE GAMES

If you thought that monumental greed, unbridled ego, colossally poor judgment, and grossly negligent regulatory “oversight” accounted for most of the financial meltdown, you might be mistaken. At least Steve Forbes wants you to accept a much simpler explanation. “Mark-to-market accounting,” he asserts, “is the principal reason why our financial system is in a meltdown.”

I’m no CPA, but as I understand it, mark-to-market requires a financial institution to reduce the value of an asset on its books when the market value of that asset – what someone else is willing to pay for it at this moment – falls.

This is, of course, highly inconvenient and might have serious consequences for those high-flying financial institutions that threw caution to the winds in pursuit of competitive profits (and fabulous bonuses for certain personnel), even if they existed only on paper. But the solution to their problem is to allow them to invent a more flattering value based on some phony market situation sometime in the past?

Bernie Madoff made up tens of billions of dollars in phony profits and lived the high life. Ramalinga Raju made up a billion dollars in bank deposits and more than 10,000 employees and lived the high life. Both used phony numbers to make their con games work. The longer they were able to keep their scams going the greater the losses their victims had to suffer.

Now Forbes wants the SEC to enable the banks to do the same thing. Only this time it would not be part of the problem, it’s supposedly a major part of the solution. Is he kidding?

If some banks are “too big to fail,” all of them are too human not to fail in some judgments at some point. Why should the government create moral hazard by insuring their losses and, as AIG and others seem to have managed, their bonuses, too? We need less accounting gimmickry, more transparency, constant and effective oversight, and swift and certain justice – and we need all that now more than ever.

Charles Blum