In this paper, I review the major arguments in John Searle's 1995 book, The Construction of Social Reality, and use them as the basis for exploring the relationship between economic reality and financial accounting numbers. In this book, Searle provides the tools to analyze factual type representations in terms of objective and subjective with respect to both their ontological status and their epistemological status. Using these tools, I demonstrate that many financial accounting representations may be properly characterized as epistemologically objective facts, even though they have an ontologically subjective mode of existence. Other financial accounting representations, however, only come into existence in accordance with a set of rules, financial accounting rules, that have no objective basis in either physical or institutional reality. The financial accounting rules for aggregating the monetary amount of total assets, for calculating net assets, net income and earnings per share are more akin to the rules for a game such as football. Once the rules have been established, certain representations based on those rules may be said to be epistemologically objective with respect to those rules, even though there is no objective basis for the rules themselves. This does not, however, render financial accounting representations useless. In fact, I argue that representations of net income and owners equity are useful because, like economic price indices and other such indicators, they are fuzzy indicators of wealth and changes in wealth. As such, they are not foolproof representations. Depending upon the rules, such indicators may be constructed in ways that are more or less reliable, or more or less misleading with respect to the objectives of users. Indeed, from this perspective, the job of standard-setting bodies, such as the FASB, can be characterized in terms of continually amending the rules in an effort to keep “the game” within the bounds of acceptable perceptions of reality.