If the following is accurate, the FASB slipped yet another mark-to-market extension to the banks sometime last week:
Mark to Market Slip Slides Away
“...it is quite possible that the financial stocks see an improvement in earnings this quarter. The US Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) changed the mark-to-market rules last week, which many (including your humble analyst) thought was needed. First, they suspended the mark-to-market rules for assets in distressed markets. Second, they widened the definition of “temporary” impairments of troubled assets, which will “allow banks to write up the value of some troubled assets if these have been hit by falling markets without (yet) suffering any significant credit losses.” (www.gavekal.com)”
http://www.gold-speculator.com/thoughts-frontline/5981-why-bother-bonds.html
But this three-pointer at the buzzer might be a moot point anyway, as of today, as far as giving a pop to prices of financial stocks. Today’s GM (Government Motors, nee General Motors) action has really changed the game.
They will try every possible rigging imagined before they quit involuntarily. They would reach a point where they can't possibly pull another trick. To them, just letting things go now is worse than death. All grand fantasy of financial globalization and unending growth and prosperity to which they threw so much intellectual and political capital into would go "poof," leaving nothing.
There is more than staggering loss of money in this crisis. It is the end of their collective vision(fantasy) of history, and as a corollary, their raison d'etre.