Goldman Sachs chief executive Lloyd Blankfein has said that banks only have themselves to blame for fair value accounting problems.

Blankfein argued that banks did not account for asset values accurately enough prior to the financial crisis.

‘If more institutions had properly valued their positions and commitments at the outset, they would have been in a much better position to reduce their exposures,’ he wrote in the Financial Times.

Some blame the controversial rule – which says assets have to be valued at prevailing market prices with any variations booked as profits or losses – for billions of dollars in bank asset write-downs.