Reviews the book "1931 Credit Manual of Commercial Laws With Diary."

Reviews the book "Successful Speculation in Common Stocks," by William Law.

Reviews the book "Certified Public Accountant Laws of the United States," compiled by the American Institute of Accountants.

Reviews the book "How to Audit: A Manual of Procedure."

Methods of the usual, present, orthodox type are unstabilized because they ignore all lack of uniformity in the value content of the measuring-unit in which the depreciation is expressed. If, for instance, a building cost $50,000 in 1910 and had an expected life of twenty years, with no final scrap value, the depreciation, according to the customary, straight-line method would be the unstabilized one of $2,500 for each of the twenty years regardless of whether, as thus stated in the dollar value of 1910, it was equivalent to $2,500 in the average general price level of each of such twenty pars. Orthodox calculation of depreciation thus assumes that the original cost, when distributed as depreciation over subsequent periods, will continue to have the same economic significance as it had when incurred-or, in other words, that the monetary standard of measurement remains stable in value. The chief merit of such an unstabilised depreciation method is the greater ease in theory and application resulting from the assumption of a higher degree of simplicity in the measurement of facts than is actually there.

The article discusses economic theory in relation to accounting valuations. All items which are included under the term assets may be very roughly divided, for the purpose in hand, into two groups, more or less accurately designated as follows, repositories for funds and summations of costs. In the first may be placed cash in its various forms, account, notes, bonds and other claims for money and securities or rights readily realizable in money if not representing sums to be collected at specified times. In the second group are organization and development charges, land and wasting assets, structures and equipment of all types, long and short-term prepayments and various classes of inventories. As in most classifications there are many doubtful cases, one division shades into the other. Finished goods produced under contract, for example, are from the standpoint of both economic and legal character very closely allied to ordinary receivables. As a rule the valuation of items in the first group is a relatively simple matter, depending primarily upon legal conditions, simple arithmetical calculations and judgments as to good faith and responsibility of debtors. Further, in this group of cases there is ordinarily little to be gained by attempting to apply interpretations and reasoning of economics.