The FASB changed mark-to-market rules under political pressure, letting banks inflate asset values.

Evidence

One of the main arguments for the ultimate irrelevance of the market designers was that it was not so much “the market” that mattered when it came to the actual valuation of the wonky assets—it was rather a concerted political push to change the accounting rules, so that banks could proceed to assert that the values of the assets were whatever they wanted them to be. Under pressure from the White House, the Treasury, and the banking lobbyists, the Financial Accounting Standards Board was induced to change rule FASB 157-e in April 2009, against the explicit disapproval of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants and the Center for Audit Quality. Mortgage-backed assets could now be listed as enjoying elevated values in bank and SIV balance sheets, without all that muss and fuss of the excessive complexity of boutique auctions. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 875

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s ongoing catalog of post-2008 policy responses that let banks set their own valuations — complements market design as distraction thesis.