Friday, January 30, 2009

Financing Bailouts

University of Chicago professor Eugene Fama (EF) has a 13 January 2009 post at his new blog with Kenneth French, Dartmouth professor, Fama/French Forum, about financing bailouts, link: http://www.dimensional.com/famafrench/2009/01/bailouts-and-stimulus-plans.html. What EF did looks like accounting to me. Some of what EF wrote reads like Milton Friedman.

Tom Selling (TS) uses the "Largest Possible Entity" (LPE) concept at his Accounting Onion on 7 December 2008, link: http://accountingonion.typepad.com/theaccountingonion/2008/12/the-preliminary.html. This LPE notion blows aways virtually all the smoke of Keynesian economics by distinguishing "real" from "financial" assets. Once you realize: cash, receivables, payables, options, etc., are not real assets, you can dismantle Keynes on your own. TS's LPE is a more powerful analytical engine than even he thinks.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Keynesian economics = license to steal.

Anonymous said...

Selling says... "No presentation format can be satisfactory unless it assists readers in assessing the performance of a company, independent of any decisions regarding financing that management made."

Like what do these entities look like when the monetary liquidity tide goes out?

Maybe this would uniformly strip out leverage?

Independent Accountant said...

Edgar:
Mencius Moldbug has a 22 January 2009 post at his "Unqualified Reservations" you might read. It's very long, but might be worth your time. Keynesian economics is a put on. It's just a series of exploded fallacies and rationalizations to inflate.
Anonymous:
I don't understand your question.