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Earnings Calls: 
Morgan Stanley Fourth Quarter Earnings Call
Author: Rozalina Destanova
123jump.com
Last Update: 1:21 PM EST December 21 2007


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The brokerage firm took an additional $5.7 billion mortgage-related writedown, while announced a $5 billion cash injection from a Chinese state-run investment fund. The return on average common equity from continuing operations was 7.8% compared to 23.8% the prior year. Institutional Securities posted a pre-tax loss of $6,479 million, reflecting the mortgage related writedowns. Global Wealth revenues of $6.6 billion were up 20% from 2006 driven by stronger transactional revenues.


Investors Question and Answers

 
Sequential Earnings Growth | Quarterly Earnings by Year | Quarterly Earnings Growth by Year

Source: Company filings    Q1:February  Q2:May  Q3:August  Q4:November
 
Roger Freeman (Lehman Brothers): The fixed income business run rate without the charges was in the $1.1 billion range. Can you comment on the impacted November?

Colm Kelleher: The credit markets are where we have the greatest degree of uncertainty. There is no doubt that not just in the mortgage area, but in our credit markets broadly we are seeing little activity. We continued to see buoyant activity in our interest rates and currency business. This is our second best quarter ever, and that continues the pace, and we see demographic trends that will underscore that business and allow us to grow it. We see no fall off in activity there. Secondly, the fall off of our commodities business was not a result of fall off of flow. It was a result of poor trading, and we feel optimistic about that. In terms of the run rate on the fixed income business what you are looking at is a few quarters of contraction in the credit businesses until we can get some clarification on extension of credit to liquidity.

Roger Freeman (Lehman Brothers): Do you think investment banking is going to be up next year?

John Mack: Our investment banking pipelines are healthy. Our M&A pipelines are healthy. Our IPO pipelines are healthy. The world economy could change that could be contingent.

Mike Mayo (Deutsche Bank): On your super senior mezzanine, you have net $3.9 billion left; how much of that has been written down - you had $11 billion a year-ago, which would imply it is written down to 35 cents of a dollar, but it was $14 billion when you took the positions. That implies 29 cents of a dollar; can you give some color there?

John Mack: We have sold some but the problem with giving you that ratio is that you are not looking at like-to-like instruments in the street. All I can say is that we have used the valuation methodology where we are comfortable with the valuations we have taken, but these instruments have different attachment points, different vintages from house-to-house.

Mike Mayo (Deutsche Bank): Is that in the ballpark, like using $11 billion from a year ago?

Colm Kelleher: It is a function of the collateral tools underlying them; it is a function of the attachment points.

Mike Mayo (Deutsche Bank): Did you sell a lot or little?

Colm Kelleher: We sold enough amounts to allow us to price our portfolio.

Mike Mayo (Deutsche Bank): The new $5 billion of capital would have a modest impact on book value until August 2010. Is that correct?

John Mack: That is right.

Mike Mayo (Deutsche Bank): Will there be impact on fully diluted shares until then?

John Mack: No, it starts accreting in depending on the threshold price. When we actually get the reference price, we will give further details.

Mike Mayo (Deutsche Bank): What count do you give for risk taking at the organization?

John Mack: This was a caveat that we are in a risk business and we will be taking risk. If you look at currencies, the interest rates, if you look what we did in the equity trading businesses, they were exceptional results. This is one desk who in my view took risk that they made a misjudgment on. In the short run, this firm is going to be much more cautious in some of these larger bets. From that perspective we are going to dial it back. For putting risk capital into our trading positions and also into some of our proprietary positions, we will continue to do that. Anytime you have a situation like this and as we have changed reporting our risk monitoring we have Mitch Patrick running the trading areas with more monitors working for him and do we get that set up the way we want? I think we have been sprinting and we are going to be jogging right now for a while, but we will still be in the market taking risk.

Meredith Whitney (CIBC World Markets): Are there any similarities in terms of trading strategies and how are you going to manage risk and look this commodities trading into 2008?

Colm Kelleher: Our commodities issue is a simply one. It was poor trade. We were badly positioned in electricity, natural gas and oils. We have taken steps of moving people around to reenergize that DNA. I do not think there is any issue there of risk management or anything wrong otherwise. We think it is a business that will contribute significantly to our projections going forward.

Meredith Whitney (CIBC World Markets): Compensation expense for your employees in the fourth quarter was a nice number. are you, therefore, optimistic towards 2008?

Colm Kelleher: We have to represent and repay the enterprise value of the firm. The bottom line is, if you had have backed these losses to our businesses this would have been a great year for Morgan Stanley. These losses came from a small desk, proprietary trading desk. We did not feel it was appropriate to punish the rest of the firm for that, but we also think we will have challenging times ahead of us. There are going to be opportunities, where we with our franchise can take real advantage and make money and we want to make sure we have the best people in place for that.
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