-- Dorothy Parker
With the change of
seasons, I am just back from a two-week break in Russia, including a stretch so
deep in the countryside as to be beyond all connectivity.
An annual break is
probably no less important in the ink-spreading trades than elsewhere – although
more for health and re-focus than for risk control (witness the “vacation rule”
violations now part of the Paris trial of Société Générale’s rogue trader Jérôme
Kerviel).
In any event it’s a
good time for a pause:
- BP’s agonies in the Gulf and in Washington have pushed off the front pages the mis-adventures of Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers, showing once again that the capacity for public outrage is both finite and subject to “proximity bias.”
- The late-stage
negotiations in the US Congress over financial institutions reform legislation
include not one word of attention to the survivability plight of the global
audit franchise of the Big Four firms – leaving that multi-dimensional problem
to leap onto the public screen with the next (and inevitable) outbreak of
financial scandal.
- Two significant court decisions still await the leisurely pace of the judiciary: the Florida appellate ruling in the Bankest matter, which could determine the fate of the Seidman accounting firm, and the United States Supreme Court’s now overdue ruling on the constitutionality of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (see here) – the latter having potential to unleash onto the world of financial information regulation all the mischief that Messrs. Frank, Waxman and Dodd can muster.
- And above all,
outside the US at least, the season of the Coupe du Monde attracts far more
interest and attention -- especially with the French team crashed out early in a spasm of mediocrity, petulance and politics -- than the soporific pronouncements from the accounting
standards-setters about GAAP/IFRS convergence.
There being nothing worth tooting a vuvuzela about, in other words, let respect be paid to the quiet of summer.
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