The pressure on regulators and accounting rulemakers to ease fair value accounting standards in an effort to help end the financial crisis has been intensified by politicians.

Nicolas Sarkozy, French president, is to urge his European Union counterparts to back changes that would introduce more flexibility in the accounting rules. David Cameron, leader of the UK’s opposition Conservative party, said the rules had made the crisis worse and needed to be addressed. On Wednesday, Charlie McCreevy, the EU’s internal markets commissioner, said the bloc would follow if other parts of the world relaxed fair value accounting standards.