Who knew accounting could get so emotional? A proposal from the Financial Accounting Standards Board is already drawing a sizable stack of correspondence, and it certainly couldn’t be described as fan mail.

The FASB proposed in late May a pair of new Accounting Standards Updates that would require a new method of accounting for financial instruments. The first would require financial institutions to record the value of their held-to-maturity loans at fair value, and the second ASU would elevate the visibility of “other comprehensive income,” the income statement line item where changes in those fair-value marks will get recorded.

To get a sense for the rancor that is brewing over the latest fair-value proposal, just take a stroll through the early comment letters. Only a few weeks into a four-month comment period, FASB has heard from more than 40 individuals—mostly financial and investment advisers, bankers, and individual investors.

Most of the letters carry a kind of “what are you thinking?” tone to them. “What exactly are you trying to accomplish by doing this?” asks Gregory Klein, a financial adviser with Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith. “Crush the recovery like a grape? Confuse matters even more?”

Thomas Kilpatrick, an independent financial advisor, asks simply, “Do you not get it?”

Matthew Van De Motter, a financial advisor with Morgan Stanley Smith Barney, worries it will fuel panic when markets turn downward. “We must do all that we can to never allow that unplaced fear to take hold again,” he writes. While there’s some merit to the logic behind fair value for loans and securities, “it can turn a brush fire into an inferno when people are not acting logical,” he said.

“Mark to market loan accounting is a bad idea,” writes John Sherman, who identifies himself as a private citizen writing from an investment advisory firm e-mail account. “In my mind you are largely responsible for the market collapse in 2007, 2008, 2009.”

Mark Versella, CFO at Community Federal Savings Bank in New York, is another opponent to the proposal. “With the lack of markets for most of the assets and liabilities you propose to ‘value,’ we are left to assume that this fair value will somehow be based on some type of model,” he says. “Another valuation model is not what our financial system needs.”

Not to be outdone by the detractors, however, FASB did garner at least one supporter so far. “You can’t allow banks to lie about the value of the derivatives in your books,” writes Brian Crowell, who identifies himself as an economics teacher. “Stop asking for public comment on this crap. You already know the banks and Wall Street will be all over you about it. Restore mark-to-market accounting and don’t tell anybody … You will be a hero to the American people and not just another group of politicians that needs to be replaced.”

Crowell got inspired again a few days later and submitted a second comment letter: “Pricing something above what you could sell it for in the marketplace to most Americans is called fraud,” he says. “Of course this is what drove the economy into a ditch in the first place.”

FASB will continue to collect comments on the proposal through September 30.

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