Bill Tanona (Goldman Sachs): Would the margins have improved there if you excluded that?
David Sidwell: The margin would have been less if you took out the benefit of the insurance supplement.
Ron Mandel (GIC): Was the $480 million the actual amount of red ink that the trading strategies posted during the quarter?
David Sidwell: Yes.
Ron Mandel (GIC): What would be a normal quarter?
David Sidwell: It was important for to us single this out because it was a big driver. We do not tend to try and we would produce a telephone directory if we went business by business talking about performance in each period. The track record over time has been positive although quarter by quarter there are some swings.
Ron Mandel (GIC): In regard to the Level 3 assets, you said you had a $600 million mark to model gain in the second quarter and you said it was bigger this quarter. How much bigger it was?
David Sidwell: We are still making sure that we are going asset by asset and bucket them into 1, 2, and 3. We are expecting the number to increase, and that increase reflects, both the movement from Level 2 into Level 3, but just as importantly that given the widening of spreads and other market moves there are a number of derivative instruments on which we have made mark-to-market gains which show up in Level 3. I do want to highlight that on balance those are then offset by losses in Levels 1 and 2.
Ron Mandel (GIC): The more complicated structures in Level 3 were to some extent the hedges so you had hedge gains of some sort that were offset by more cash-like losses elsewhere. Is that what the Level 3 gains are related to?
David Sidwell: It is so complicated, because you have to look at instrument by business and by trading strategy, so it is a mixture of all of the above, so there are items in Level 3 that are hedges of other levels but there are also items which are being hedged by Levels 1 and 2.
Jeff Harte (Sandler O’Neill): Can you follow up on the comments you made about taking a couple of quarters for credit to get to a more normalized environment?
Colm Kelleher: What we were looking at was the necessary repricing of credit with spreads that got too tight. We also had various business lines that were predicated upon a distribution model. What is not certain is the degree to which some of those distribution lines will be reopened. We are confident that the U.S. mortgage market will resume or we are beginning to see early signs of commercial and residential mortgage origination and securitization and buyers of that. There are other parts of the capital products where that distribution is not yet proven, and that is what we are referring to as being unsure on outlook. Some of the more opaque products will suffer in this. Transparency will be key in terms of products and pricing for a while and that is why we have a cautious outlook. |