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Like foreign languages, we may learn to live, perhaps even love, them. Attempts to compel a common language might risk creating the accountancy equivalent of Esperanto. Unfortunately, the analogy is inexact. Banks are, by their nature, international. So too are investors in, and regulators of, banks. If all parties speak different languages at the same time, the result is likely to be noise rather than signal. For banks, the noise to signal ratio has been particularly high during this crisis. Differences in accounting standards have contributed to this noise. In 2008, UK banks’ assets would have been £ trillion, or around 30%, larger under European IFRS than under US GAAP standards. These differences make problematic international comparisons of such rudimentary concepts as bank leverage. This in turn hinders investors’ risk assessments and regulators’ supervisory assessments.   A failure of efficient markets is not of itself a failure of fair value  It is commonly heard that the failure of EMH argues against fair value in favour of some alternative, such as amortised cost. The truth is more subtle than that. Deviation from EMH will cause both accounting measures to deliver distorted signals of value. Depending on the precise circumstances, either measure might deliver a more accurate measure of true economic value. To see this, consider four scenarios. Consider first a bank making a single loan. In the first period, amortised cost and fair valuations of this loan will be equal. Expected cashflows will in both cases be discounted at the prevailing market discount rate.