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Jim Sinclair’s Commentary This is controlled information that is parceled out within the confines of what people can stand. Truth be known, if value to market was applied, there would not be a solvent bank in Western finance. The devil is in the details thanks to FASB’s selling out of their souls. The guardians of truthful, transparent auditing gave license to fraud. Bank Closing Information – December 17, 2010 These links contain useful information for the customers and vendors of these closed banks......

WASHINGTON -- The only thing worse than bankers making up accounting rules is members of Congress making them up. Repeating its blunder from the 1994 battle over stock options, the staid Financial Accounting Standards Board has buckled to political pressure demanding that it change accounting rules. The FASB voted Thursday to ease the interpretation of rules requiring banks and other big institutions to value their assets on a reasonable basis. The value of the banks' assets is a huge issue for the global economy right now, because banks are required to have a certain amount of cushion to back up...

provided by NYT If mark-to-market accounting is to blame for the current financial crisis, then the National Weather Service is to blame for Hurricane Katrina; if it hadn't told us the hurricane hit New Orleans, the city would never have flooded. This is the logic the bankers are using, and they are getting sympathetic ears in Congress. The bankers have gotten two members of Congress to introduce a bill to establish a new body that could suspend accounting rules for financial institutions. Edward L. Yingling, the president of the American Bankers Association, says the proposal addresses "systemic risks that accounting...

Why are the Pharisees of Accounting in the U.S. trying so hard to destroy American business? Having crippled high tech entrepreneurship and made it nearly impossible for any U.S. company to ‘go public’, the people who set the rules of financial disclosure are now making corporate financials so obscure that investors literally have no way of knowing the financial condition of their companies.

No matter what one thinks of the financial bailout package, we ought to at least agree how we got here. The real actors behind the mortgage panic of 2008:…

FASB Votes To Remove QSPE Concept From FAS 140, FIN 46R Yesterday (April 2, 2008), FASB voted to remove the Qualified Special Purpose Entity (QSPE) concept (used for some securitizations) from FAS 140, Accounting for Transfers and Servicing of Financial Assets and Extinguishments of Liabilities, and to remove the related scope exception from FIN 46R, Consolidation of Variable Interest Entities (VIEs). In addition to removing the QSPE concept, the board also approved amendments to the derecognition criteria in paragraph 9 of FAS 140 (changes shown in redline form on pages 1-2 of the board handout), and agreed to provide guidance...

New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer has claimed credit for all kinds of improvements in corporate behavior -- better ethics, fewer "conflicts of interest" -- that are said to benefit shareholders. He's now getting a spirited rebuttal to those claims regarding his biggest target -- insurance giant AIG and its former CEO Hank Greenberg. It comes in the form of a white paper from Mr. Greenberg's legal team examining the charges of bad accounting at AIG on the ex-CEO's watch. We've seen a copy of the paper, which is now in the hands of regulators, and it makes a compelling...

Americans have had no lack of dramatic news this year. The Boston Red Sox finally broke the 86-year-old "curse of the Babe" and won a World Series.... But events that don't make headline news often are more important than those that do. That quiet backdrop is explored by Sir Harold Evans, a British journalist, in "They Made America: From the Steam Engine to the Search Engine -- Two Centuries of Innovation," (Little Brown & Co.) In an interview in the winter issue of "Invention & Technology" magazine, he is quoted as saying that America became economically strong through the "adaptive...

WASHINGTON - The House voted Tuesday to override a rule that would require companies to count stock options against their profits, but a key senator promised to block such action in that chamber. The House vote was 312-111, with 198 Republicans and 114 Democrats voting for the bill that would block a proposal by the rule-setting board for accounting. The board is seeking to force publicly traded companies to record as an expense all forms of share-based payments to employees, including stock options. The rule change proposed by the Financial Accounting Standards Board in March could dramatically reduce the reported...

FASB Reaffirms Desire To Expense Options When Granted . By Lingling Wei Of DOW JONES NEWSWIRES NORWALK, Conn. (Dow Jones)--The group that sets U.S. accounting rules reaffirmed its desire to require companies to deduct the costs for employee stock options from profits when they are granted. The issue of how to treat employee stock options as an expense came up Wednesday when the seven-member Financial Accounting Standards Board met to discuss the accounting for stock options awarded to non-employee workers, such as those whom companies outsource work to. The board agreed that a single set of accounting principles should apply...