Volume 6, Issue 2 -

The recent Maystadt report (2013) challenged the European Parliament to modify governance arrangements surrounding the design and endorsement of international financial reporting standards (IFRS) issued by the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB). In addition the Maystadt report constructs an argument that accounting information has the capacity to also modify behaviour and that this might not be conducive for the European public good, financial stability and economic development. In this paper we argue that IFRS need to be stress tested for their impact on firm-level financial stability in a financialized world. The financialized firm can revalue a range of assets to their market value crystalizing future earnings into current values but these valuations can become impaired. Asset value impairments will be charged to shareholder equity but this is being hollowed out because a higher proportion of earnings are being distributed to shareholders. Accounting disclosures are not only an information feed to users they inform the stewardship and control of a firm’s resources and in the financialized firm the potential for financial instability is heightened and this can translate into a moral hazard for society.

Recent shortcomings in corporate affairs, related to the bursting of the New Economy Bubble and the global financial crisis, have forced regulators to strengthen current rules introducing new bans and requirements, aimed at guaranteeing the substantial and economic fairness of related party transactions (RPTs). In 2010 rules regarding RPTs were completely reshaped by the Italian Regulatory Body for the Italian Stock Exchange (CONSOB Regulation no. 17221). One of the most important amendments regarded the change in the criteria by which RPTs are mandatorily disclosed to investors. This change replaces a selection process based on a qualitative with a quantitative approach, in order to reduce the subjectivity of this particular evaluation. This study aims to analyze the effectiveness of the disclosure of RPTs after the introduction of the new rules. Our results show that although the new rules contribute to increasing the amount of information disclosed to investors through a higher number of documents reported by companies, their percentage in relation to the overall amount is worryingly low.

It is much more realistic to say that the banks “create credit,” that is, that they create deposits in their act of lending, than to say that they lend the deposits that have been entrusted to them. And the reason for insisting on this is that depositors should not be invested with the insignia of a role which they do not play. The theory to which economists clung so tenaciously makes them out to be savers when they neither save nor intend to do so; it attributes to them an influence on the “supply of credit” which they do not have. The theory of “credit creation” not only recognizes patent facts without obscuring them by artificial constructions; it also brings out the peculiar mechanism of saving and investment that is characteristic of full-fledged capitalist society and the true role of banks in capitalist evolution. With less qualification than has to be added in most cases, this theory therefore constitutes definite advance in analysis.