It was talked about a couple of weeks ago in the Wall Street Journel.

  Another option they mentioned was to lower the reserve requirements for bank.    It is a good article. Thanks for sharing.  

As a follow up, good short video from the author of the above article:

  http://www.ftportfolios.com/Commentary/EconomicResearch/2008/12/3/perspective_on_the_recession

[quote=Greenbacks]It was talked about a couple of weeks ago in the Wall Street Journel.

  Another option they mentioned was to lower the reserve requirements for bank.    It is a good article. Thanks for sharing.  [/quote]

Primo - They've been talking about it for months.  That's why you should tell all your clients to use equity indexed annuities.

Yeah lets blame the accountants – their the cause of all this. If only they followed Chinese GAAP, where the results is what you want it to be, this whole mess would be solved.

  As I recall from college, isn't an asset (in this case a big dumb bank) valued at something like its' future cash flow (PVed of course)? Changing accountants counting rules is basically the same as a currency reform.

[quote=MinimumVariance]Yeah lets blame the accountants – their the cause of all this. If only they followed Chinese GAAP, where the results is what you want it to be, this whole mess would be solved.

  As I recall from college, isn't an asset (in this case a big dumb bank) valued at something like its' future cash flow (PVed of course)? Changing accountants counting rules is basically the same as a currency reform. [/quote]   Nobody is saying it's the accountants' fault.  But, it appears that temporarily suspending mark-to-market accounting for some assets could relieve a little stress on the balance sheet.   I would think at least trying this idea, as well as bringing the uptick rule back, would be better than throwing money around and seeing where it sticks.