Commissioner McCreevy urges easing accounting rules for banks
10 Oct 2008
In remarks before a plenary session of the European Parliament in Brussels on 8 October 2008, Charlie McCreevy, the European Commissioner for Internal Market and Services, urged the IASB to ease accounting rules for banks under IFRSs.
In addition we are urgently putting changes to our accounting rules to ensure Banks in the EU can avail of the same flexibility that is offered to banks in the US. Namely this will provide the option for individual banks if they want to move assets from their trading books to their banking books. This is a comitology measure which I hope the Parliament will be able to give its agreement as a matter of urgency. In the meantime I would hope that national supervisors would apply these new provisions already so that banks, who wished to, could avail of this new possibility for their third quarter results. In addition there is the IASB's acceptance of the US SEC's clarification of the use of fair value accounting when there is no active market information. This is also highly relevant for banks and should be used for third quarter reporting. |