An accounting revolution? The financialisation of standard setting

This paper analyses the political-economic content of the recent ‘revolutionary’ shift in financial accounting rules for listed companies, specifically the rise of IFRS and fair value. It connects this shift to the socio-economic changes that are currently being discussed in the literature on financialisation, e.g. the rise of shareholder value and the proprietary view of the firm. Two ideal-typical accounting systems are constructed on the basis of normative accounting theory and extant standards – historical cost accounting (HCA) and fair value accounting (FVA). The ‘accounting revolution’ of the past 10–15 years can be understood as a qualitative shift from HCA to FVA. It is further argued that these ideal-typical systems are related to different circuits or forms of capital – productive and money capital respectively – and to the particular perspective that these afford on the, capitalist firm. Inasmuch as financialisation is related to the circuit of money capital one can make sense of the rise to prominence of FVA, which represents the dominance of a financial view of the firm in the field of financial accounting. Throughout this paper, however, the limits to financialisation are also highlighted and traced back to the ineradicable manifestation of the circuit of productive capital. 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. * Correspondence to: Forschungskolleg Postwachstumsgesellschaften, Humboldtstraße 34, 07743 Jena, Germany. Tel.: +49 03641 945030. E-mail address: [email protected].