Some blame the rapacious lenders. Others point to the deadbeat borrowers. But Stephen A. Schwarzman sees another set of culprits behind all the pain in the financial industry: the accountants.
A new accounting rule — “an accounting rule!” — partly explains why the American financial system looks so wobbly these days, he says.
Mr. Schwarzman, the co-founder of the private equity giant Blackstone Group, has been espousing this view for weeks over lunches and at cocktail parties around the globe. It’s a controversial hypothesis, which others have put forward before, and it has sparked plenty of debate within the industry. But Mr. Schwarzman is convinced that the rule — known as FAS 157 — is forcing bookkeepers to overstate the problems at the nation’s largest banks.
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