Please respond to lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com cc: (bcc: DANIEL DAVIES) bcc: DANIEL DAVIES Subject: Re: bull market reasoning
Hurray! I apparently completely underestimated the extent to which people care about accountancy
>Enrique Diaz-Alvarez asks:
>>Why are GAAS asinine?.....
>GAAS are asinine because they count real investment as negative profit.
>>What part[s] of GDP, exactly, is[are] not measured by [GAAS-defined]
>>transactions ?
>1. Gross Private Domestic Investment (Because R&D and other
>future-profitability-enhancing expenditures are counted as deductions
>from net income instead of as increases to capital.)
Errrrm .... Some forms of R&D can be capitalised -- R&D aimed at the exploitation of a defensible patent to make a marketable product, for example. What Baruch and his measly mob want to capitalise is things like *marketing* spend aimed at building a brand (Amazon already does this), and I'm going to take some convincing that brands are part of the capital stock at the whole-economy level.
>2. Capital Consumption, because those ["intangible] parts of the capital
>stock previously mistreated as expenses are not accounted for when they
>depreciate.
A glance at Glaxo's accounts suggests that this problem is smaller than you imply.
>>and Daniel Davies asserts:
>>All true, but based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what accounts
are
>>for. The *purpose* of a set of accounts is to be a record of
transactions.
>>The accounts of a company record the stewardship which its directors and
>>officers have exercised over the previous year. Accounts are useful if
one
>>is valuing a company, but that is not their purpose. Their purpose is to
>>allow the members of a company to keep track of what the company has
done.
>>When a company has spent money on research and development, then that
money
>>has been paid to somebody else, and is not available to the company any
>>more. True, the company will be able to make profitable transactions in
>>future, but it can then *account* for them in the future.
>The whole point is that money spent in building a factory is just as much
>"...paid to somebody else, and...not available to the company any
>more..." as is money spent on inventing and designing the
>machines that will go into that factory. To call one
>"investment" and the other "expense" is, from the viewpoint of an
economist,
>asinine, however much money it may save corporations by understating their
>"taxable
>net income" (or, later, exaggerating their carryover losses).
Without wanting to patronise, accounts are prepared for accountants, not economists. If economists don't like the way the figures are prepared, they can prepare their own -- R&D and marketing expenditure are disclosed in notes to the P&L, and it hardly takes a genius to capitalise them.
>From the accountants' point of view, there is a very definite reason why it
is not asinine to call the machines "investment" and the research
"expense", and if you had ever had to deal with a winding up of an
insolvent company, you wouldn't need to ask why. Because companies cannot,
in general, own people, they cannot pretend that they own knowledge which
is locked in those peoples' heads. Intangible assets which could
conceivably be sold separately from the company (patents, newspaper
mastheads, magazine imprints, life assurance business in force, etc) can be
included in a set of accounts. Intangible assets which have no value
separate from the value of the business (brands, R&D in progress, etc) are
part of the goodwill of the company, and should not be confused with its
book value. Bringing internally created goodwill into the book value
destroys the usefulness of the concept of return on equity and turns the
accounts into little better than stockbrokers' reports.
dd
Shane Mage
"Thunderbolt steers all things." Herakleitos of Ephesos, fr. 64
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