I'm glad I missed this piece when it aired. You are not serving your listeners' interest by "decoding" an issue in this manner. You correctly identified, in accounting terms, what a write-down is. But you failed miserably to square that definition with what banks have been forced to do, because you imply that banks are simply writing down their mortgage assets to what they're "worth" (who could be agaist that?). The entire issue at hand in this drama is determining what bank assets are worth.

The accountants want to say that the worth of securities backed by mortgage loans is dependent primarily upon how much those securities could be sold for in the "market" (I use quotes because there is no market for these securities at present). Banks, on the other hand, want to model the value of the securities based on traditional valuation techniques for securities used by educated investors- future cash flow and reasonable discount rates.

If you want to give your listeners a much better analogy to explain what is going on, tell them that their own mortgage loan is probably held on some bank's balance sheet at $.60 on the dollar, or so. In other words, if said listener owes $200,000 on his/her mortgage, the bank has had to write-down that mortgage to, say, $120,000, so they have had to write-off $80,000, regardless of whether or not the loan is paying on time and adequately secured. If you ask your listeners if that approach to valuing assets is reasonable or rational, I think the overwhelming response would be "no"...in fact, I think people would be outraged if they understood the issue in this manner, and further understood that these so-called "fair value" accounting requirements are largely to blame for the banking sector crisis. But unfortunately, you continue to miss opportunities to explain the issue this way. You can do better.