Bank of America Corp (BAC)’s Fourth Quarter 2014 Earnings Conference Call Transcript

Guy Moszkowski, Autonomous Research

Would you ever consider changing that? And if you were to do so, would there be a significant one-time charge that would be associated with that?

Bruce Thompson, Chief Financial Officer

No, I think it goes the other way the reality is that we run through the P&L that amortization to catch up in effective way ended up being lower than when the premium was set on. So, I think the way that we do it is absolutely appropriate. And keep in mind, the other thing and I reference in my earlier comment is that, as you do this from a balance sheet perspective you’re always adjusting the valuation of your AFS securities to be the fair market value at the time that you publish your financials and obviously that flows through our CI.

Guy Moszkowski, Autonomous Research

Yeah, fair enough. You also talked about changing line items or lines of business, where certain things are booked as we move into 2015. That was fairly clear, except I was wondering, will this also entail moving the very large investment portfolio of your mortgages from all other into the consumer category?

Bruce Thompson, Chief Financial Officer

It will not result in a large portion of mortgages being moved. There may be a smaller amount or a percentage of it that we continue to evaluate because the one thing that we want to make sure that we do is to have the geography of the financial statements motivate the behavior of the people that serve the client base that they do. So there may be possibly a relatively small amount of home equity loans that could travel into the consumer business. But it’s not going to be anything that the storage things in many meaningful way.

Guy Moszkowski, Autonomous Research

Got it. Thanks. Then final one for me, you talked a little bit about the investment banking backlog at the turn of the year. But more broadly for global markets and global banking plan has taken together, can you give us a sense now that we’re a couple weeks into the year, how the in particular say, trading activity has started off? And given some of the increase in volatility, especially with big moves like what happened with the Swiss franc today, are you instructing the global markets business to pull back on risk, or generally are you seeing that some of those volatility levels are in some way beneficial?

Bruce Thompson, Chief Financial Officer

I think there is a couple of part to that. The first is I think if you look at overall risk levels that we ran within the global markets business and if you look at our information that we put out at year-end, that even with the little bit of the pickup in volatility at year-end, borrows it low levels and overall balance sheet levels where at low levels as we exited the year. And I think with nine trading days into the quarter, so, I think it’s a little bit early to forecast what you would expect for the quarter for the overall sales and trading businesses. The only thing I would say is that clearly the activity levels that we’ve seen that have spend more way return to normal than what we experience in the month of December. But I wouldn’t want anyone to draw any conclusions — nine days, through 62 trading days in a quarter.

Guy Moszkowski, Autonomous Research

Sure. It’s early. Thanks very much. I appreciate the color.

Bruce Thompson, Chief Financial Officer

Thank you.