On April 1, 2020, the financial news trumpeted that the FASB was taking, as Andrei Postelnicu put it in the Financial Times, ’significant steps in reforming the way companies report pension liabilities.’

The Financial Times article (FT.com, April 1, 2020) goes on to say,

‘The move aims to increase the transparency of financing for certain pension plans and replace a system in which the balance sheet “almost always” fails to reveal the true state of those benefit plans, according to the Financial Accounting Standards Board.’ However, this change in accounting standards only represents a further slow tightening of the screws regarding the way pension liabilities are reported — a step in a long, excruciating journey that has been underway for decades.

According to this summary on the FASB website:

FASB Concepts Statement No. 5, Recognition and Measurement in Financial Statements of Business Enterprises, paragraph 2, indicates that “the Board intends future change [in practice] to occur in the gradual, evolutionary way that has characterized past change.”

The GASB is taking similar, but not identical steps in requiring more truthful accounting of public pension funds.

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On January 28, 2020, an Associated Press dispatch proclaimed: “Corporate Earnings Good Despite Headlines”, stating that “corporate profits remain very healthy overall, and the majority of corporations are beating expectations.”

Michael Mauboussin, chief investment strategist of a large fund management group, in the report cited in “Legg Mason Argues For More Efficient Stock Buybacks“, also wrote in January 2006 that “corporate America is flush, and returns and cash flows remain strong.”

Are these assertions true and does this mean that the outlook is rosy for the average investor in U.S. equities?

As the Federal Reserve national flow of funds table F102 reveals, the answer is,

“Yes, U.S. corporations are flush with cash and profits are growing”, and

“No, this does not mean the outlook is rosy for the average investor in equities.”

The reason for this apparent contradiction is that the most practical and useful measure of value for corporate profits depends on who you are.

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One of the most entrenched principles of securities market supervision is ‘non-merit regulation’ — a guiding light of the Securities and Exchange Commission since its founding in 1934.

The idea behind ‘non-merit regulation’ is that the SEC should focus efforts on getting issuers and intermediaries to provide disclosure of material facts about securities being marketed and traded, leaving it to investors to decide whether a security is a good investment or not.

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