After the S&L crisis, market regulators and accountants cracked down on inflated real estate valuations rampant during that binge period and demanded new accounting rules forcing instant price-tagging of all assets based on what the market would immediately deliver. Even though the credit market has largely frozen over, the rules say the banks must book prices on these bonds as if they were being sold today. And now, the Securities and Exchange Commission plans to tell publicly traded companies that, while they still must use market prices for many of the instruments they hold no matter how bad those prices look, they can also give investors a wider range of the possible values for those asset-backed securities. The senator said he had heard