Mark to Market Rules Finally Under Review

The consequences of Enron's downfall are still being felt today.  Specifically, a few years ago the SEC, in a well intentioned effort attempted to secure market confidence in a publicaly traded company's stock price by demanding greater accounting transparency to a company's asset valuations with a "mark-to-market" approach.  Well all good intentions left aside, the devastating consequence of this approach in the past year has left many banks with significant liquidity fits or outright insolvency because of its nearly insane daily re-evaluation (or seemingly devaluation) asset requirement.  In short, instead of transparency, this insanely conservative approach has brought about a fire sale on performing assets to raise cash to cover phantom liquidity shortages.  Congress needs to keep the pressure up on the SEC and the FED to pull back from this approach.  Once Mark-to-Market rules are at best dropped or at least revised, the flow of credit will be restored, the credit crunch will be over, and then we don't need no more overblown stinking stimulus packages to add fuel to the other fire we are currently stoking - inflation!