Martin J. Whitman (September 30, 1924 – April 16, 2018) was an American investment adviser and a strong critic of the direction of recent changes in Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) in the U.S. He was founder and Co-Chief Investment Officer of Third Avenue Management, and Portfolio Manager of the Third Avenue Value Fund. Early life and education Whitman was born to a Jewish family in the Bronx, New York. He served in the US Navy in the Pacific during World War II. Returning to New York state, he graduated from Syracuse University with a B.S. in business administration in 1949. He held an M.A. in economics from the New School of Social Research. He worked for various investment firms in New York City before setting up his own company in 1974, M.J. Whitman & Co. His first big successful investment was his purchase of $100,000 in mortgage bonds issued by the bankrupt Penn Central Railroad. He later sold the bonds for five times his original investment. Views on Generally Accepted Accounting Principles Whitman used the quarterly shareholder letters of his fund as a running critique of what he called the "primacy of the income account" ("primacy of the income account" means that corporate wealth is created only by flows, i.e., having positive earnings, and/or cash flows for a period), which he argued serves only short-term speculators rather than long-term investors. For example, in his July 31, 2004 letter Wayback Machine, he wrote that recent developments in GAAP "...increasingly impose unneeded and counter-productive burdens on American corporations, American management and American capital markets. GAAP... ought to be geared toward meeting the needs and desires of creditors rather than the needs and desires of short-term stock market speculators... [T]he amount of money invested in credit instruments of all types in our economy dwarfs the amount of funds invested in equities." Furthermore, "Most private companies, given a choice, seek to enhance [Net Asset Value] by means other than having reported operating income, which is taxable at maximum rates." He argued that "in GAAP... material facts [should] be disclosed in a conservative, consistent, and reliable manner", and that "Financial statements [should] be prepared under the assumption that the users of such financial statements are reasonably intelligent, reasonably diligent, and are people who understand not only the uses, but also the limitations, of GAAP... [T]he most GAAP can give... are objective benchmarks which the