How Goodwill Accounting’s Makeover Hits S&P 500, in Six Charts

A plan to overhaul how companies account for goodwill would shrink more than a third of the book value of the S&P 500 and could push such household names as CVS Health Corp., IBM Corp., and PepsiCo Inc. into negative equity, a Bloomberg analysis shows.

Goodwill is all that separates 89 of the 500 top companies from a negative book value, where a company’s liabilities would exceed its assets, according to Bloomberg data. Book value is a fundamental method of valuing companies, though its utility has been questioned in recent years for failing to capture the value of intangibles and ...