No accounting for tastes

Accountants didn’t give loans to shaky borrowers during the credit boom, nor did they securitise those assets and pick up six-figure bonuses as a result, but standard-setters such as the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) still caught a lot of flak for the crisis.

For the most part, criticism revolves around the enthusiasm with which standard-setters embraced fair-value accounting in the years preceding the credit crunch. With markets in collateralised debt obligations (CDOs) of asset-b