Of course, that's why relaxation of the rule is not a panacea that many have described it to be - because it was not at the root of the valuation issue to begin with - which will have to be decided by the market. It only fixes a technical problem which was not anticipated when setting the rule up, but was exploited and did play a role in the stock market turmoil of financial companies when applied on strictly bureaucratic basis.
FASB, of course, has also screwed up on the options "transparency" issue, and their revised merger rules are screwing up and killing mergers that otherwise would have taken place, but now cannot be justified financially. For a little known agency they have done a lot of damage in recent years, in my opinion for no other reason than asserting their power, i.e. because they could.
We are moving from GAAP to IRFS within a couple of years anyway, so why should IASB care about an internal FASB issue which doesn't really affect the valuation of assets, only moves an illusion of such from one end of balance sheet to another to solve the issues in US stock market? Real issue affecting valuations is liquidity or illiquidity, and FASB rule change doesn't change the fundamentals.
Re SOX, it has been a bad law on a host of issues. It was rushed into by politicians in the wake of Internet bubble and accounting shenanigans, and it seriously drained foreign and domestic investment from our capital markets. People have been prosecuted for financial crimes before and without SOX, but it treats CEOs and CFOs as "criminals in waiting". But outside of that it had little, if anything, to do with this financial crisis. So, trying to blame SOX for valuation issues does make it a straw man argument.
That about says it, though lot of commentators here and elsewhere still don't understand this.
Her take is that though there some efficiency issues (primarily related to the fact that SOX, at least as interpreted by the external auditors, causes some misallocations of auditing efforts toward sometimes minor issues) it has gone a long way toward reducing abuses, and that's not a bad thing that upper management is a bit uncomfortable unless they are really on top of accounting and reporting issues - that's one of the reasons we pay em' the big bucks.
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IMO many commentators - including many financial and economic "experts" interviewed the mainstream media - really have not yet absorbed the enormous damage done to America's international position by regulatory failures. My wife gets an earful of this when international directors are in town - for a long time in this country we've had the luxury of telling the rest the world "my way or the highway" in this regard. That's over, and I don't think most people even begin to appreciate how OVER it is.