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At TrendMacrolytics, Donald Luskin comments on the new FASB rule on expensing stock options:
In some sense, this rule is the equivalent of letting a company put profits into its income statement based on nothing more than an estimate of what those profits will be in the future. Believe me, you'd go to jail if you did that. But now you'll go to jail if you don't do the very same thing with respect to expenses.
Thankfully, companies will still have to report the details of their outstanding options: issue dates, expiration dates and exercise prices. So careful analysts can still arrive at accurate calculations about true options expenses — just like they could have done before this new rule was enacted.
So as we get to the end of the year, here's my suggestion for a New Year's resolution: no more rules. We have enough of them already, and they've long ago ceased to mean anything. Yet we have to spend so much time wringing our hands over them.
Let's drop the rule-making for a while and get back to actually running companies, and investing in them. Read the whole thing.
posted by James DeLong @ 11:14 AM | Accounting
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