Abstract

The recent financial crisis highlighted the inability of financial markets of being always able to cope with the liquidity needs of banks. This gave rise to a great attention to the issues related to the liquidity in the banking sector.

Stakeholders interested in assessing the liquidity profile of a financial institution can rely on data provided through its financial statements. This demonstrates the strong influence that the accounting discipline can have on it. Accounting standards can play an important role in depicting the liquidity profile (and the associated risk) of an entity, as they contribute to produce information useful to predict timing, uncertainties and amounts of its future cash flows.

The objective of this theoretical study has been to investigate the contents of the IASB Conceptual Framework and of some of its standards, i.e. IAS 7, IFRS 7, IFRS 9. In particular, the aim of the analysis has been to verify if the financial information requested by the regulation is adequately useful and relevant in order to assess the liquidity profile of a financial institution. In our opinion, the IASB discipline still presents some deficiencies on this aspect, in particular for entities operating in the banking sector.

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