AUDITING SHADOW

摘要

Have auditors learned more from the 2008 financial crash than economists? The high priests of the dismal science refuse to recognise that the world has changed, though their discredited theories continue to collapse about their ears. Any serious examination of the causes of collapse is not in the university syllabus, which now reads more like a mathematics branch line. One recent Nobel Prize-winning economist has dismissed the US Federal Reserve's money-creating frenzy of $85bn (£53bn) per month as 'a kind of nothing activity, a neutral event; the trillions of asset purchases on one side of the Fed's balance sheet, and the trillions of government debt on the other, basically cancel out. It's no big deal'. Fortunately, there isn't a Nobel Prize for auditing brilliance, so there is no need to seek out examples of crassness on a comparable scale.