Interesting piece in CFO.com about the Securities and Exchange Commission round table about fair value. The session is expected to be a nuanced affair, which is hardly surprising given that the big financial institutions, which had huge write downs, and the fair value bashers won't be there.

Last week, I had a chat with telstra's chief financial officer John Stanhope about fair value and he said it was time to junk it.

Stanhope told me: "When analysts decide they have to wait for the CEO and CFO to present the performance results of the company and don't read the financial statements because they are too complex, and made complex by things like fair value measurements, then we have probably lost the plot with respect to financial reporting. It really is a question of whether fair value and mark to market of financial instruments does provide any useful information. When the companies themselves and the people who use the reports are asking the question of why don't you tell us the real position, that's sort of a big hint that's it not meeting the objectives, so let's perhaps move away from fair value."

Maybe, but the most important interesting part about the debate is that the companies ripping into it are the same ones that made a fortune out of it when the market was booming. I look at that issue in my column here.

In theory, fair value creates more transparency and accountability, and serves as a risk management tool. Get rid of it and the crisis will last longer because no-one will know where the losses are because it has been replaced by a system that pretends market prices are not real.

Still, in practice, it was not handled that well when the bubble burst. But then, no-one blames accounting rules and the market's imperfections when they are making mega-millions.