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"Historians have not convincingly explained modern capitalism's two major economic crises, the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2008-2009. Accounting for Crises offers a new explanation, why both began and were more severe in the USA ("America"), based on an accounting interpretation of Marx's theory of crises. It explains their origins in capitalists' control of accumulation, which reveals important overlooked roles for Irving Fisher's accounting theory. This theory, by allowing discretion in accounts, in the context of falling rates of profit, encouraged "swindling", overstating reported profits, and understating their risk, which facilitated and aggravated both crises. Framed by Fisher's theory, during the 1920s American accounting theorists justified discretion, which Creating the "Big Mess" (the companion volume) concluded it management used to conservatively smooth earnings. Accounting for Crises shows that Fisher's theory , also underlays the popular new theory of investment that justified valuing shares using reported earnings, which encouraged their manipulation and legitimized "speculation". This, it argues, underlays America's exceptional late-1920s stock market boom, the 1929 Great Crash, and the depth and length of its Great Depression. Prominently associated with the boom, Fisher became unpopular after the crash, his name disappearing from public debate. Nevertheless, the book concludes, his theory hindered economic recovery, weakened 1930s reforms, undermined accounting regulation from the late-1930s, and following his rehabilitation from the late-1950s, underlies the Financial Accounting Standards Board's conceptual framework, which by allowing off-balance-sheet accounting for securitization-SPEs, fostered the 2007 "credit crunch" that triggered the 2008-2009 Global Financial Crisis (GFC)."

Acknowledgments -- List of tables and figures -- List of abbreviations -- The invisible hand -- Marx's theory of value and accounting -- Accounting and the production of capital -- An accounting critique of marxist economics -- Marx's accounting solution to the "transformation problem" -- Fixed capital -- Productive and unproductive labor -- Appendix A: Accounting for the circulation of capital -- Appendix B: Extracts from IAS 2 inventories -- Appendix C: Decision tree -- Appendix d: national income accounting deviations -- Conclusions -- Bibliography -- About the author

A major debate neglected by accounting historians is the importance of landlords in the English agricultural revolution. The paper uses accounting evidence from the historical literature to test Marx's theory that, from around 1750, England's landlords played a pivotal role by adopting and then spreading the capitalist mentality and social relations by enclosures and changes in the management of their estates and tenants. It gives an accounting interpretation of Marx's theory of rent and argues that the available evidence supports his view that the conversion of English landlords to capitalism underlay the later stages of the agricultural revolution. The conclusion explains the linkages in Marx's theory between the agricultural and industrial revolutions, and calls on accounting historians to conduct archival research into the agricultural roots of modern capitalism.