Fair Value Method
The ownership of less than 20% creates an investment position carried at historic book value or fair value (if available for sale or held for trading) in the investor's balance sheet.
In accounting, fair value (also knows as "fair market value") is used as a certainty of the market value of an asset (or liability) for which a market price cannot be determined (usually because there is no established market for the asset). Under US GAAP (FAS 157), fair value is the amount at which the asset could be bought or sold in a current transaction between willing parties, or transferred to an equivalent party, other than in a liquidation sale. This is used for assets whose carrying value is based on mark-to-market valuations; for assets carried at historical cost, the fair value of the asset is not used.
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A gold nugget
Fair market value (FMV) is an estimate of the market value of a property.
Since market transactions are often not observable for assets such as privately held businesses and most personal and real property, fair value must be estimated. An estimate of fair value is usually subjective due to the circumstances of place, time, the existence of comparable precedents, and the evaluation principles of each involved person. Opinions on value are always based upon subjective interpretation of available information at the time of assessment. This is in contrast to an imposed value, in which a legal authority (law, tax regulation, court, etc.) sets an absolute value upon a product or a service.
A property sale, in lieu of an eminent domain taking, would not be considered a fair market transaction since one of the parties (i.e., the seller) was under undue pressure to enter into the transaction. Other examples of sales that would not meet the test of fair market value include a liquidation sale, deed in lieu of foreclosure, distressed sale, and similar types of transactions.
In United States tax law, the definition of fair value is found in the United States Supreme Court decision in the Cartwright case: the fair market value is the price at which the property would change hands between a willing buyer and a willing seller, neither being under any compulsion to buy or to sell and both having reasonable knowledge of relevant facts.
The term fair market value is used throughout the Internal Revenue Code among other federal statutory laws in the USA including bankruptcy, many state laws, and several regulatory bodies.