Accounting rulemakers to change mark-to-market changes--Isn't this what tanked Enron?

I came across this benign looking tidbit of news about changes to mark-to-market accounting rules. Now when a layperson hears mark-to-market, they might think of the accounting practice that helped Enron to appear fiscally healthy although it wasn't.

Admittedly, I need to do more research on this, and will provide an update once I make heads or tails of this. Specifically, I want to know if this is going to help companies falsely inflate their fiscal healthiness better understand how these changes could potentially impact us given the current economic situation.

In the meantime, please let me know what you think.

From the article:

"WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. accounting rulemakers on Thursday agreed to make adjustments to a proposal to change mark-to-market accounting rules concerning when transactions would be considered distressed. [...]

The board, at a meeting in Norwalk, Connecticut, said it would remove a presumption in its original proposal that would have allowed all transactions in an inactive market to be considered distressed unless proven otherwise. It said that particular language could have had unintended consequences.

FASB also said the objective of mark-to-market, or fair value accounting, in inactive markets would be to determine what an asset could fetch in an 'orderly' transaction between market participants. It said an 'orderly' transaction would not include distressed transactions or fire-sales.

The board is continuing discussions on the rule and another rule on other-than-temporary impairment issues that affect when writedowns have to be taken on financial assets that have suffered a decline in value." Source: Yahoo! News

For those of you who are unfamiliar with mark-to-market-accounting and Enron, here is a excerpt from the Journal of Accountancy:

The role of mark to market accounting in the rise and fall of Enron
Enron incorporated “mark-to-market accounting” for the energy trading business in the mid-1990s and used it on an unprecedented scale for its trading transactions. Under mark-to-market rules, whenever companies have outstanding energy-related or other derivative contracts (either assets or liabilities) on their balance sheets at the end of a particular quarter, they must adjust them to fair market value, booking unrealized gains or losses to the income statement of the period. A difficulty with application of these rules in accounting for long-term futures contracts in commodities such as gas is that there are often no quoted prices upon which to base valuations. Companies having these types of derivative instruments are free to develop and use discretionary valuation models based on their own assumptions and methods.
The Financial Accounting Standards Board’s (FASB) emerging issues task force has debated the subject of how to value and disclose energy-related contracts for several years. It has been able to conclude only that a one-size-fits-all approach will not work and that to require companies to disclose all of the assumptions and estimates underlying earnings would produce disclosures that were so voluminous they would be of little value. For a company such as Enron, under continuous pressure to beat earnings estimates, it is possible that valuation estimates might have considerably overstated earnings. Furthermore, unrealized trading gains accounted for slightly more than half of the company’s $1.41 billion reported pretax profit for 2000 and about one-third of its reported pretax profit for 1999. Source: Journal of Accountancy