Banks and other financial institutions are lobbying against fair-value accounting for their asset holdings. They claim many of their assets are not impaired, that they intend to hold them to maturity anyway and that recent transaction prices reflect distressed sales into an illiquid market, not what the assets are actually worth. Legislatures and regulators support these arguments, preferring to conceal depressed asset prices rather than deal with the consequences of insolvent banks.

This is not the way forward. While regulators and legislators are keen to find simple solutions to complex problems, allowing financial institutions to ignore market transactions is a bad idea.

A bank typically argues that a mortgage loan for which it continues to receive regular monthly payments is not impaired and does not need to be written down. A potential purchaser of the loan, however, is unlikely to value it at its origination value. The purchaser calculates a loan-to-value ratio using the current, much lower value of the house. After calculating the likelihood of default, the potential buyer works out a price balancing the risk of default and amount that might be lost – a price well below the carrying value on the bank's books.