Goldman boss defends fair value accounting
Blankfein says accounting method did not exacerbate crisis
Goldman Sachs chief executive Lloyd Blankfein has said that banks only have
themselves to blame for fair value accounting problems.
Blankfein argued that banks did not account for asset values accurately
enough prior to the financial crisis.
‘If more institutions had properly valued their positions and commitments at
the outset, they would have been in a much better position to reduce their
exposures,’ he wrote in the Financial Times.
Some blame the controversial rule – which says assets have to be valued at
prevailing market prices with any variations booked as profits or losses – for
billions of dollars in bank asset write-downs.