| The U.S. sub-prime crisis happened in the August 2007 rapidly evolved into the global financial crisis. As a result, the global economy is serious affected and investors suffered heavy losses, and financial markets took a sudden turn for the worse. The sub-prime crisis caused widespread concern, and many scholars begin to study. To the causes and countermeasures of the sub-prime crisis, there are many different kinds of views, but most analyzed from the financial point of view. At present, the accounting point of view analyzed the sub-prime crisis are mainly focused on the fair value. There is few scholar who analyzed from the view of off-balance-sheet liabilities. This paper attempts to remedy this deficiency, to study the causes and countermeasures of the sub-prime crisis from the view of off-balance-sheet liabilities.For the past few years, with the economic operations of listed companies increasingly complex, especially the innovation of financial products, many operations are outside of the balance sheet, making certain assets and liabilities dissociated from the balance sheet for a long term, without effective regulation. As the imperceptibility and nondeterminacy of the off-balance-sheet liabilities, its risk is usually ignored. When the off-balance-sheet liabilities accumulated to a certain degree, under the burst of factors or other conditions, the potential hazards of off-balance-sheet liabilities broke out, and at this time the enterprises often have no ideas, but even worse it is likely that those who have been long-neglected off-balance-sheet liabilities ultimately lead to corporate bankruptcy. In the sub-prime crisis, it is a large number of off-balance-sheet liabilities and long-term unregulation, when room rate continued to decline and the federal benchmark interest rate continued to is rise, off-balance-sheet liabilities are ultimately transformed into liabilities accounted in balance sheet, caused a substantial increase in debt, many financial institutions have closed because of insolvency.In this sub-prime crisis, these factors including the call provision, the fair value, guarantees and commitments, asset securitization, structured investment vehicle, special purpose entity and credit default swaps make the off-balance-sheet liabilities numerous and widespread. In the circumstances of increasing U.S. interest rates and depressed housing market, those off-balance-sheet liabilities are becoming the"on-balance-sheet liabilities", making the companies, especially the money corporations, helpless in the face of the sudden risk, and ultimately go bankrupt for insolvency. And the risk of off-balance-sheet liabilities transmits along with the financial derivatives chain, and eventually led to the subprime crisis. The consequences of off-balance-sheet liabilities during the subprime crisis include affecting the transparency of accounting information, the distortion of accounting information, increased information asymmetry and increased the risk of financial institutions.In this paper, countermeasures to deal with the sub-prime crisis from the point of off-balance-sheet liabilities include: further improve the understanding of off-balance-sheet liabilities, speed up the development of the off-balance-sheet liabilities standards, to strengthen the audit of off-balance-sheet liabilities, to further improve the corporate governance, enhance corporate account consolidation, strengthen the supervision of OTC financial derivatives, to assess the quality of bank assets as soon as possible and further improve the information disclosure of the fair value. |
