Here's a quick survey of the personalities demanding some sort of change.

James Dancy, vice president of AIC Investment Services.

'…fair value accounting can provide neither transparent nor complete information. Even more importantly, it succumbs to animal spirits. The pro-cyclicality of fair value reporting in this market environment is well understood by market participants and its mechanisms were well described by Paul De Grauwe in his article on the opposite page, "Act now to stop the markets' vicious circle".

'While there are many merits to fair value accounting, more needs to be done to lessen the impact of pro-cyclicality. We can only hope that the accountants, when crafting future drafts, poke their heads out of the library and walk down Main Street from time to time.'

Prof Paul De Grauwe of Leuven   University was even tougher on fair value, using some real doom and destruction language in the Financial Times

'Occasionally, as a result of bad news or foolish behaviour of some of these institutions, lenders withdraw their funds, thereby creating (or aggravating) solvency problems, which in turn lead to further withdrawals. The market then starts to co-ordinate lenders into massive withdrawals, leading to massive solvency problems at financial institutions that, without the withdrawals, would have been perfectly all right.

He goes on...

'Today the accounting rule of marking to market is driving us at high speed into the abyss. A speed limit must be imposed. It can be achieved only by temporarily allowing financial institutions not to mark to market.'

Christopher Whalen, a so called 'firebrand' US banking analyst, was reported on Financial Week as saying,

'In the absence of fair-value accounting, the tens of billions of dollars in trading book losses reported by Citigroup, Merrill Lynch and other global investment firms might have been greatly re-duced or avoided entirely,” said Mr. Whalen, who co-founded Institutional Risk Analytics.'

Martin Sullivan, CEO of American International Group, having written down $11bn, said he wanted a...

'"short-term interpretation or amendment” to current accounting standards.'

Those in charge of maintaining the fair value/marking to market standards must be feeeling the heat reading comments like these in the press. It will be interesting to see how the current reviews of IAS39 or FAS157 turn.

Update 28 March.

I just found this from Steve Forbes of Forbes magazine...

'The Bush administration must take two steps immediately to quickly halt the unending, enervating credit crisis: shore up the anemic dollar and, for the time being, suspend "marking to market" those new financial instruments, such as packages of subprime mortgages.'

The attack continues then.