“Unreliable Accounts: How Regulators Fabricate Conceptual Narratives to Diffuse Criticism” by Karthik Ramanna: A Comment on Ideological Capture

Karthik Ramanna in ‘Unreliable accounts: How regulators fabricate conceptual narratives to diffuse criticism’ considers how the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) justified a conjunctural break from historic cost accounting (HCA) to Fair Value Accounting (FVA). Karthik’s paper explores how the US Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) legitimized the introduction of fair value accounting (FVA). This fundamental reorientation of financial reporting practice can, he argues, be understood within a framing device: conceptual veiling. Firstly, the FASB is (suspected to be) captured by the interests of investors and capital market actors. Secondly, the FASB needed to construct new narratives to enable this reorientation in accounting practice and this was achieved with changes to the governing conceptual framework. An alternative framing device is offered in this review, that of the financialization of company financial reporting and implications for company viability as opposed to a capital market efficiency perspective. Financialized accounting facilitates the valuation of a range of asset classes to a market value. These asset valuations are speculative in nature. FVA accounting imports speculative capital market risk onto company balance sheets and this can threaten company financial stability and viability for a going concern.