U.S. blogger Roger Ehrenberger recommends putting an end to FASB and shaking up the SEC in the wake of revelations about the Lehman debacle. The former derivatives trader writes:
“Between lobbying dollars and entrenched interests, our financial regulatory regimes have become so perverted as to have little basis in reality. I recently penned an Op-Ed in the Financial Times where I made the point that all the clamor and criticism around derivatives was ill-founded, that financial transactions completely divorced from derivatives could and have caused even more damage than derivatives themselves. The Lehman example is a case in point. This is not a story about derivatives, no more than Enron was a story about derivatives. But the key take-away should be that if our rules and regulations are so porous as to allow transactions like Lehman’s to gain approval from their “blue chip” legal counsel and expensive “Big Four” accountants, then there is a serious problem with the state of our regulatory framework.”