Relax the rules! Override the FASB! No, it's all a Ponzi scheme enabler, it's Enron Style accounting!

What are these people even talking about with mark-to-market accounting methods?

Mark to market accounting simply means assets are valued at the current market prices. Where the controversy comes into play is in those assets which are not easily assessable since there is no actual market upon which to evaluate them.

So, what happened was we had fictional financial models created to evaluate the value for some types of derivatives. This is what the Enron scandal was in part about. There was no separate established market for energy derivatives, thus Enron with their conspirators, made up some over-inflated fiction on these contracts since there was no real world check to determine their true value.