Financial reporting and accounting in a downturn: PricewaterhouseCoopers advises:
"Current market conditions have resulted in additional challenges for companies in preparing their financial statements and related disclosures including asset impairments, valuation issues and liquidity disclosures. Yet, at the same time, users of financial information and regulators are seeking increased transparency in financial statements and related disclosures to understand the risks and business issues companies face."
So let's get this straight. At a time when it is of paramount importance that companies restore investor and consumer faith in their ability to manage their balance sheets many of them, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers, are failing to allocate the resources needed to produce reports that foster transparency? Oh, boy... this can't be good.
And what of PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), that benevolent global accounting giant whose news release promotes how it can "help companies learn more about financial reporting and accounting in turbulent times"? How can PwC possibly promise that their new "Economic and Credit Crisis Task Force" will be able to lead companies out of one of the most complicated and perilous marketplaces in capitalism's history? How can its Task Force, made up of "senior cross-functional experienced practitioners who understand market volatility" deliver the goods?
"Senior cross-functional experienced practitioners"??? What? Who are they? What are they? A new breed of PwC accountant? Must be some newfangled group of Uber-Super-Duper-bean-counters. They must be the kind of specialists uniquely qualified to teach companies the tricks of "leveraging knowledge, experience and networks" to get them "through a multitude of capital market and economic crisis issues." Hmm, where did they come from I wondered?
Ah, ... and then I read this. And all was revealed. You see, PwC's new "senior cross-functional practitioners" were hatched in that same primordial soup of obfuscation that gave us the "casino capitalists" who "used the latest tricks to cook the books with many of the on-balance sheet or off-balance sheet structured investment vehicles that metastasized big time in the first decade of this new century." So, who better to explain the absolute friggin' fiscal nightmare that has befallen North America capitalism than the same group of PwC player's who "O.K.'d" the books at AIG and FreddieMac last year! They surely must know the way out... right?
With ass-clowns like PwC offering their services to save capitalism what could possible go wrong? If only every company had their very own PwC "senior cross-functional experienced practitioner" teaching them how to 'leverage knowledge' to overcome the affliction of "asset impairment" all would be right with the world. Another AIG anyone?
If the present crisis has taught us nothing else, it is that: We cannot trust the same players who got us into this freaking mess to get us out of it. As French President Nicolas Sarkozy recently remarked in the NYT's:
This crisis is not the crisis of capitalism. On the contrary, it is the crisis of a system which has drifted away from the most fundamental values of capitalism. It is the crisis of a system which drove financial operators to be increasingly reckless in the risks they took, which allowed banks to speculate instead of doing their proper business of funding growth in the economy; a system, lastly, which tolerated a complete lack of control over the activities of so many financial players and markets.
Keeping these remarks in mind, PricewaterhouseCooper's generous offer to "assist" beleaguered companies at this juncture should be taken for what is: More empty words from a "cross-functional" whore who has already given us the clap once, but who now promises that this time will be different. Yeah, right!
Condoms anyone?
That's fucking nuts! I was reading that here in Canada Stevo and Jimbo are getting together a group to advise them on the credit crisis, and they're all folks who worked in the same industry that promoted the tricks that got us into so much trouble in the first place. They want to identify "credit worthy" agents so they can lend more money.
ReplyDeleteIt's incredible that so few people see how insane it is to give money to the assholes who put us here in the first place and expect them to act differently, this time around.
It isn't a matter of experience, it isn't that they haven't learned that this shit doesn't work, it''s that they are the same greedy bastards who look at everything from the point of: what can I get out of this?
900ft