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发表于 2008-9-11 14:16:13
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"Our reporting, as in 'disclosure,' has changed significantly, but our reporting of actual amounts recorded has not changed," says Ted R. French, executive vice president and CFO of Textron, a $13.2 billion industrial conglomerate. "This particular standard did not require us to fair-value any new assets or liabilities that weren't already required to be recorded at fair value."
But it is unclear to what degree other companies can take heart from that, since compliance varies widely from one company to the next. Determining which bucket a given transaction resides in poses not only an intellectual exercise, but a bureaucratic one as well. While there were disclosure requirements to categorize deals into three buckets prior to FAS 157 — under the nongovernmental Financial Industry Regulatory Authority's Management Discussion and Analysis strictures, for instance — "it was still a significant effort to recategorize all of our transactions according to the FAS 157 requirements and systematize the process for future reporting periods," says Farr. Thus, PPL's accounting and technology staff had to go back and "force" its computer system to plug in "literally thousands of energy transactions in a given year" into one of the three buckets, he says.
For other companies, the changes in fair-value disclosure may coincide with other, more sweeping developments. Caught in the downdraft from the subprime turmoil, troubled mortgage guarantor Fannie Mae saw mixed results from the introduction of FAS 157 at the start of 2008. On the one hand, fair value underlined the company's perilous position; given the 66 percent first-quarter drop in Fannie Mae's assets, many feared a government bailout was in the cards. For its part, however, Fannie Mae reported that applying FAS 157 to the measurement of its financial guarantees "had a favorable impact on the company's results of operations for the quarter." |
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