The Government get's out of the way

I guess Chris Cox is doing his job after all, better than the rest of our government. This move alone could add trillions to our liquidity as a nation:

SEC Clarification May Help Markets
Some economists are attributing much of the current financial crisis to something as mundane-seeming as accounting.
The Securities and Exchange Commission and the Financial Accounting Standards Board have just made an announcement that, dry as it sounds, may mean a great deal: "When an active market for a security does not exist, the use of management estimates that incorporate current market participant expectations of future cash flows, and include appropriate risk premiums, is acceptable."
The SEC is not telling holders of hard-hit mortgage-backed securities that they can willy-nilly slap any value on them they want.
What the SEC is saying is: You can take other factors into account when valuing them.
There is no market right now for the worthless mortgage-backed securities -- that's one of the reasons we're in this crisis. That means financial institutions that are holding them must value them well below their former value, sometimes near zero. That makes the institutions themselves worth much less.