This is from a couple weeks back, but it deserves a mention because it will help those of you currently experiencing a crisis of professional identity.
It comes from a speech given by Wesley Bricker, the Chief Accountant of the SEC, and it’s just the kind of thing you need to hear when you’ve recently spent a holiday hearing about how great other people’s careers, kids, sex lives, or vacation plans are.
Without reliable financial information, supported by high quality accounting and auditing, investors cannot properly judge the opportunities and risks of investment choices to allocate capital to public companies, a key part of the American economy. Accounting and auditing may not readily grab the general public’s attention, but they are nonetheless important to the livelihoods of all Americans.
My god, Bricker should be tweeting this stuff. And since he gave this speech at the FEI’s Financial Reporting Issues Conference, I imagine more than a few people in the audience did one of these:
Feel free to bookmark this page for any time you’re questioning your value in the world.
[SEC via Matt Levine]
