Washington Is Killing Silicon Valley

The purpose of mark-to-market exceptions are to allow temporary price volatility not to drastically impact a firm's balance sheet. The FASB rule specifies that it's an acceptable practice to suspend mark-to-market in "fire sale" conditions.

But the real issue is the flawed risk ratings on the MBSs. If your asset is AAA then it really shouldn't matter whether you are marking it to market or not, as it's supposed to be quite liquid, by definition, as there is supposed to be extremely little risk that its price will fall.

The reason the MBSs weren't liquid is because the ratings were incorrect and the market knew that -- perverse incentives from ratings agencies had led to this, as had the widespread belief (taken as an assumption by many foolish risk-managers and codified into pricing formulae) that housing prices could not fall.

If the MBSs had been properly rated, then mark-to-market would not have caused the firms holding them on their books to become insolvent, as capital adequacy requirements are based on the riskiness of the assets.

So while mark-to-market may have sped up the failure of those firms, the firms were already weakened due to their treatment (thanks to bad ratings) of risky debt as AAA.

In fact, a few months before things got really bad the SEC sent out a memo advising that the fire-sale provisions of the FASB rule regarding mark-to-market were not to be used, a decision which suggests either that the SEC was OK with some firms failing in the near future (unlikely) or that it believed that the ratings were generally accurate (even more unlikely). I've been told by some Wall Street experts that everybody knew that the ratings were BS. Hence the SEC's decision to send the memo was probably just intended not to telegraph the possibility of a future problem to avoid spooking the market in hopes that the problem would go away.

A few things to note: The regulatory trend is moving toward BASEL II which relies heavily on both mark-to-market accounting and third party ratings agency ratings. So the big regulatory question is, how can the perverse incentives that arose and led to the inaccurate ratings of MBSs be restrained? So far everyone is talking about banning the trading of x, y, and z and of limiting bonus pay, executive salaries, etc., but nobody is talking about the actual concrete perverse incentives (pressure on ratings firms to issue inaccurate ratings) that fed the whole mess.

Don't underestimate the entrepreneurial spirit that is going on in China.

It's just political propaganda that China is oppressive and thwarts entrepreneurship. Sure there are some problems, but China's human rights issues are about on par with Gitmo.

Thanks for making the connection!

A while ago, when thinking about the boundary between long and short, decided that the problem was that we use discrete labels for continuous phenomena.

I suppose this may be related to the Anchor Bias (http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/09/anchoring-and-a.html). Something that is not a heap, after a grain of sand is added, is still a heap. Something that is a heap, after a grain of sand is removed, is still a heap.

An interesting instance of this arose when determining how numbers are described in the Piraha language, a language with only three words for quantities. Seeing one battery, the Piraha called it "ho'i". When they added one more (a large increase percentage-wise), they immediately switched to another word, so therefore "ho'i" means "one." But when they started with ten batteries and started removing them, one of them started calling it "ho'i" at six batteries, so therefore "ho'i" really means "few." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_language#Numerals_a...) I'd explain that as: when deciding whether to call something "few" or "many," they anchored off the initial judgement, and looked at the percentage change. So one politician could convince voters a 10% tax increase will have no effect by starting off "Well, what would a 0% increase do? How about 1%?", while another could convince them it would be devestating by starting off at 20%.

Of course not. After-tax returns influence them indirectly. Fellow grad student goes to work for a startup, ends up with a house vs merely a nice car.

"but there is a lot of laws setup to protect small investors"

Or to prevent them from investing in private companies without giving a piece to NY bankers? (Not implying you necessarily disagree)

Cray started illegally with small investors who all ended up making a lot of money. In the Midwest too! Good thing Washington isn't allowing that to happen again.