By PETER EAVIS

All companies emphasize the positive and underplay the negative. But banks may be taking this habit too far in their first-quarter earnings releases, many of which came out this week.

Exhibit A is Bank of America’s first-quarter earnings release, which came out on Thursday morning. At the top of the release are a set of bullet points, the second of which says the following: “Results Include Negative Valuation Adjustments of $4.8 Billion Pretax, or $0.28 Per Share, From the Narrowing of the Company’s Credit Spreads.”

The bank put that in the second-most prominent spot on the page for a reason. But first, what does it mean?

The short answer is that the bank took a $4.8 billion hit from an accounting adjustment. The conceptual thinking behind the accounting is hard to grasp, but it goes like this: If a bank’s own debt securities are falling in price, it effectively means its liabilities – the amount it owes — are worth less. Accounting rules say that’s positive for the balance sheet, and the decline in liabilities can therefore show up as a gain in the income statement. But in the first quarter, certain Bank of America debt securities were worth more, which means those liabilities increased in value, and that therefore produced a loss, of $4.8 billion, in earnings.

Not all of a bank’s debt gets adjusted in this way. And, yes, it seems absurd that falling debt prices – a sign that investors think a bank is less creditworthy – should lead to a gain in profit.

The unusual prominence of these adjustments in first-quarter releases – Citigroup and Morgan Stanley did it, too — deserves scrutiny. By giving the $4.8 billion hit top billing, Bank of America is asking analysts and investors to effectively ignore that loss when calculating core earnings.

Yes, the hits are bigger this quarter than in the past, so the desire to flag them is understandable. But investors also deserve consistency. Banks should also give big gains from this type of adjustment equal prominence. And in the third quarter of last year, when Bank of America recorded a $1.7 billion gain from this source, the boost didn’t make into the headline bullet points.

Perhaps more serious is that the debt accounting adjustments may not reflect what is going on in the real world – and may divert investors from more meaningful measures of creditworthiness. The accounting adjustments are partly based on the prices of credit default swaps, derivatives contracts investors can buy to protect themselves against the default of a company. The cost of buying default protection on Bank of America fell in the first quarter, something its chief financial officer, Bruce R. Thompson, was highlighting in the release when he said: “The narrowing of our credit spreads reflects the significant progress we’ve made to strengthen the balance sheet.”

But banks don’t borrow money in the swaps market. And real debt markets may not feel so good about Bank of America. The evidence for that? In the bank’s first-quarter numbers, the cost of the bank’s long-term debt jumped to 2.99 percent in the first quarter, from 2.8 percent in the fourth quarter. Mr. Thompson didn’t mention that in the release.