‘Fair Value’ for Financial Instruments: How Erasing Theory is Leading to Unworkable Global Accounting Standards for Performance Reporting

The LASC is pursuing proposals for accounting for financial instruments that are conceptually flawed and unworkable in practice. “Fair value” has been elevated to a catch‐all concept to resolve measurement issues objectively. Adoption of fair value, as cuwently interpreted by standard‐setters (eg, by the FASB in Concepts Statement No. 7, issued in February 2000), threatens to drive out a long‐understood, theory‐based approach to the rationales for cuwent value accounting — founded on “deprival value” — that has recently been comprehensively restated in Accounting Theory Monograph 10, issued by the Australian Accounting Research Foundation in 1998, and reaffirmed in the UK Accounting Standards Board's Statement of Principles for Financial Repovting, issued in December 1999.