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What Else Are the Banks Hiding?

Just becauase it's securitized and "off-balance sheet" doesn't mean it will come back on. You need to look at individual basis for how that will happen. Most of it won't and the the bank is not the primary beneficiary of any of it, otherwise it already would be on the balance sheet. You need to find what out is guaranteed. It is a serious oversight to simply say there are off-balance sheet entities. It doesn't remotely encompass anything close to what the real risk is.

Is Buffett Buying American Express for Berkshire Hathaway?

Get an explanation to how those calculations are being made before you believe them. Those numbers are Economic Capital as defined by IRA in association with what they think about derivative exposures, which basically means, IMO, that if you make a market in derivatives, Economic Capital "as calculated" by IRA is completely deficient because of what they assume about is required because of notional exposure. Notional exposure can increase through time through what is essentially trading and offsetting risks, not really the addition of new positions (ie: if you sell a position to another party, your net exposure went to 0, but your notional exposure doubled). If you want transparency as to what real risk for banks are considering the economic capital needed to underlie the risks on the portfolio, then they need to disclose how exactly they come up with the numbers and I've never seen that. If they have, that's great and it should be more obvious. It seems to me that the numbers they come up with are materially different than from a regulators POV and since JPM has been one of the strongest banks through the crisis and according to IRA faces the largest risk, then either the market doesn't see the risk that IRA supposes they face, or the market disagrees with the analysis.

Wells Fargo Can Hack Its Writedowns - Can Citi and JPMorgan?

Actually I'm not sure where you're deriving your economic capital in the equation from, so I'd be curious how you're getting an order of magnitude worse in your calculation. JPM has according it's own documents, from memory about $43.3 billion in EC (which is a risk based measure) in comparison to $83 Tier 1 and $120+ Total capital. JPM has an allowance ratio to nonaccruals that is very high in comparison to other companies. They do have a bunch of leveraged loans they can't sell. That's true. But that isn't the paper I'm most concerned about in this environment. If you can come up with a real calculation that brings up the EC calculation to $300 billion+, please share how you're deriving it too. Thanks.

U.S. Banks Still Need To Come Clean on Subprime

I haven't heard too much noise on this and have been waiting, because I've known it too, although the legalese makes it unclear to me exactly what will happen:

"The fact that they sold them won’t help as there are clawback provisions for bad debts and that will take ages to work through the system."

When you start to look at some mortgage lenders out there and the size of subprime loans they've sold off with the view that some of that may be stuffed right back up their @$$ (which I'm sure they will try), they start to look ever more like bankruptcy candidates, depending of course on how much recourse there ends up being. Some companies should essentially profit from this shakeout and some will get slammed. Have been trying to sort out which is which.

Anyone familiar with CA lending laws and the rights of borrowers to walk out on the loans? This is instrumental in understanding WAMU, because they're so heavily weighted towards CA. I have a friend who figures he's $100K upside down up in Sonoma. I've just started looking for details, but I believe he could probably walk out on the loan if he chose to and stick the bank with the problem. The laws are different in different states. If it's easy to walk, the banks exposed out here are gonna have a big problem.