Just my little 2c. It's not out of the ordinary to seek legal...

Just my little 2c.
It's not out of the ordinary to seek legal opinion on an accounting position at all. There's truckloads of legal professionals making a living for interpreting accounting standards for accountants and providing advice to transfer the risk of interpretation from the accountant to the lawyer.

On operational cash-flows - I agree that this is probably the best metric to view PNC by. But the issue is if book purchases are cash outflows here, then a growing company will show negative operating cash. If book purchases are marked as investing cash outflows, then operating cash isn't reflective of the quality of the purchase/collection margin.

On Fair Value Method over Amortised Cost - All public companies in this space should be recording their books at FV. While FV leaves a bit more to interpretation valuation-wise, it promotes a balance sheet that's much more reflective of the underlying assets. Something closer to a 'true' balance sheet rather than a 'statutory' balance sheet. Having said that, using FV creates a black-box that increases risk of abuse and if the rest of the industry moves towards this method then I think we'll see some pretty horrific cases. I think that PNC management has the integrity to use it properly though.