What's the Problem ? Competing Diagnosis and Shifting Coalitions in the Reform of International Accounting Standards

It does not happen very often that a technical matter such as accounting makes it into the final declaration of a G20 summit, agreed by the heads of government of the world’s leading nations. Nevertheless, this happened on November 15, 2008, two months after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers terrified capital markets and roughly eighteen months after the first signs of the financial crisis had become tangible and started to impact the balance sheets of most banks worldwide. After holding their initial meeting as a Group of Twenty in Washington to deliberate about the means to cure the most severe financial crisis since the interwar period, the leaders of the G20 called on their finance ministers to formulate recommendations in areas such as “Mitigating against pro-cyclicality in regulatory policy” and “Reviewing and aligning global accounting standards, particularly for complex securities in times of stress” (G20 2008). Ever since, measures to reform international accounting standards – namely, those produced by the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) – have been on the working agenda of G20 meetings, even if they have moved from front to backstage and are increasingly repeated in terms of the same phrases (see the Declarations of the London, Pittsburgh, Toronto, Seoul, and Paris summits (www.g20.org/pub_communiques.aspx).