by Chairman Christopher Cox
The fourth item on our agenda today is the proposal of a Roadmap for U.S. participation in the development of truly global and high quality accounting standards.
One of the proposals we just adopted earlier during this meeting requires that foreign companies make disclosures to U.S. investors in English. That is both a necessary and an important step, because despite the relatively widespread use of English and a few other more common languages, even in the 21st century the world is still a very multilingual place. Today, the top 10 languages in the world by number of speakers are Mandarin Chinese; English; Hindustani; Spanish; Arabic; Russian; Portuguese; German; French; and Japanese. And every one of these languages is spoken by over 100 million people. It may be a very long time indeed before the world's 6.5 billion people can all speak in the same tongue.
See full Speech.
Posts
