Friday, May 18, 2012

Jamie and JP Morgan appear to be stretching the truth about their CIO office hedging vs prop trading activities - and where was Jamie when all of this was going down , why no Treasurer and who thought putting an inexperienced stooge in place as Risk Manager sounded like a plan ? JP Morgan situation being compared to LTCM and Amaranth.

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/05/more-evidence-of-lax-oversight-of-jp-morgan-chief-investment-office.html


THURSDAY, MAY 17, 2012

More Evidence of Lax Oversight of JP Morgan Chief Investment Office

As reporters keep digging into the “London Whale” story, the picture that emerges about the caliber of risk controls and management supervision at JP Morgan only look worse and worse.
The latest revelations comes via the Wall Street Journal. First, that there was no treasurer during the period when the CIO entered into the loss-making trades. The idea that a bank of any size, let alone one as big as JP Morgan, would go for months (five in this case) without a treasurer in place is stunning. JP Morgan contends this is not germane, since (allegedly) the CIO did not report to the treasurer. Then pray tell, why was it housed in the treasury at all? And the bank’s efforts to make this all sound normal are undermined by this part of the story:
Joseph Bonocore, who left the treasurer’s post last October before the trading losses ballooned, reviewed weekly the positions being taken by the office and had raised general concerns about risks being taken by the London office that placed many of the questionable trades, according to a person familiar with the situation. Mr. Bonocore knew the investment unit well; he previously was its chief financial officer for roughly 11 years.
So the former treasurer was looking over the positions, even if he was not part of the reporting line (or was he?).
But worse, the risk manager tasked to the oversight of the unit appears underqualified for the job, and that might not be unrelated to the fact that he is the brother-in-law of a JP Morgan executive. The Key extracts:
J.P. Morgan Chase JPM -4.31% & Co. didn’t have a treasurer in place during a five-month period when the bank’s Chief Investment Office placed trades that led to more than $2 billion in losses.
In addition, the executive put in charge of risk management for the Chief Investment Office in February, Irvin Goldman, was a former trader, not a risk manager. He is also the brother-in-law of another top J.P. Morgan executive, Barry Zubrow. JP Morgan argued that many risk professionals come from trading (true) but his background does not look logical for oversight of a business dealing in complex “hedges”:
Mr. Goldman had little risk-management experience before taking the chief risk officer post at the Chief Investment Office. He spent most of his career as a trader, starting at Salomon Brothers in the 1980s. He oversaw interest-rate product sales and trading at Credit Suisse First Boston and in 2003 joined Cantor Fitzgerald, where he was president of its debt capital markets and asset management divisions. Mr. Goldman ultimately left Cantor in October 2007 after his unit piled on trading losses during the previous summer.
Even though his role at Credit Suisse might sound relevant, he left that position nearly 10 years ago, and I would anticipate practice has changed quite a bit. Cantor is known primarily as an inter-dealer broker in Treasuries. Readers are welcome to correct me, but I am not aware of Cantor being a significant player in complex derivatives, and they would not seem to be positioned to play that role (you need a large balance sheet and good market share in the related cash products to be competitive).
An article at CNBC yesterday raised another troubling issue, that the CIO had a more permissive value at risk model than the rest of the bank. This is consistent with the idea raised by Michael Crimmins earlier today, that the “whoops we allowed that model to put on a lot of risk, didn’t we?” was not an accident, but a way to allow a unit that was expected to take risk to put it on, and/or put less capital against those positions. From CNBC:
The JPMorgan Chase unit that lost more than $2 billion through a failed hedging strategy had looser risk controls than the rest of the bank, according to people familiar with the situation.
The risk of losses is tallied by the bank using a so-called value at risk (VaR) calculation. However, the Chief Investment Office, the unit responsible for the high-profile loss that JPMorgan disclosed last Thursday, had a separate VaR system.
It used a less stringent calculation that gave a lower risk assessment of its trades, according to people who previously worked at the bank. The unit also reported directly to CEO Jamie Dimon, a factor which allowed it to maintain a separate risk monitoring set-up to other parts of the investment bank, these people said.
Despite repeated warnings from executives inside the firm as long ago as 2005, the CIO unit remained notably free from oversight. A source with knowledge of the situation said that these warnings included the size of the CIO, the fact that its risk reporting was not transparent and the scope for the unit to get “bigger and bigger” because it had a lower cost of funding than the rest of the investment bank.
Until April, the CIO unit’s unusual autonomy allowed it to build up risky positions without triggering alarms.
Sports fans, letting a unit run with lower VaR and is completely inconsistent with the JP Morgan party line, that the CIO was in the business of hedging. And this part is therefore no surprise:
Indeed, the unit was encouraged to be a profit center, as well as hedging against risk…
The facts in the public domain about this unit are damning. And if Jamie Dimon survives, as expected, it will serve as yet another bit of proof of how deeply the Obama Administration is in bed with major banks.




http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-05-17/u-s-banks-sold-more-swaps-on-european-debt-as-risks-rose.html


U.S. banks increased sales of protection against credit losses to holders of Greek, Portuguese, Irish, Spanish and Italian debt in the last quarter of 2011 as the European debt crisis escalated.
Guarantees provided by U.S. lenders on government, bank and corporate debt in those countries rose 10 percent from the previous quarter to $567 billion, according to the most recent data from the Bank for International Settlements. Those guarantees refer to credit-default swaps written on bonds.
Jamie Dimon, chairman and CEO of JPMorgan, said that the bank was trying to reposition a portfolio of corporate credit derivatives and used a flawed trading strategy. Photographer: Peter Foley/Bloomberg
May 17 (Bloomberg) -- Komal Sri-Kumar, chief global strategist at Los Angeles-based TCW Group Inc., talks about the impact of Europe's sovereign debt crisis on U.S. financial markets and the economy, and the outlook for Federal Reserve monetary policy. He speaks with Susan Li on Bloomberg Television's "First Up." (Source: Bloomberg)
Last week, Spain’s government took control of Bankia SA and asked banks to increase provisions for souring real estate loans. Photographer: Angel Navarrete/Bloomberg
JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) and Goldman Sachs Group Inc., two of the top CDS underwriters in the U.S., say they have bought more protection than they sold, indicating they may benefit from defaults in the region. That outcome is called into question by JPMorgan’s $2 billion loss on similar derivatives, which shows that risks don’t vanish when offsetting bets are taken, said Craig Pirrong, a finance professor at the University of Houston.
“All these hedges trade one risk for another,” said Pirrong, whose research focuses on derivatives markets. “The banks say they’re flat on European risk, but that’s based on aggregated positions. We don’t know how those will hold off if the European crisis blows up.”
JPMorgan Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon said last week that the bank was trying to reposition a portfolio of corporate credit derivatives and used a flawed trading strategy. The lender, the largest in the U.S. by assets, is believed to have sold protection on an index of corporate debt and bought protection on the same index to hedge its initial bet, according to market participants who asked not to be identified because their trading strategies aren’t public.

The two bets moved in opposite directions this year, causing losses and proving that even hedges that look perfect can break down, Pirrong said.

JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs

JPMorgan said in a regulatory filing that it purchased $144 billion of CDS related to the five European countries as of the end of the first quarter, while it sold $142 billion.Goldman Sachs (GS) bought $175 billion of protection and sold $164 billion, the firm said in its filing. Spokesmen for the two New York- based banks declined to comment. Bank of America Corp.Morgan Stanley (MS) and Citigroup Inc. (C) report only net CDS exposures.
The five banks together account for 96 percent of the credit-derivatives market in the U.S., according to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. JPMorgan has written a quarter of the total, the OCC data show.

Matched Protection

Not all protection sold by banks is matched exactly by protection bought. CDS purchased and sold on Spanish sovereign debt can have different expiration dates. Banks also can net a swap on a Spanish bank with one on another lender. Even if those two firms are in a similar condition at the time of the trades, one could deteriorate faster, increasing the cost of CDS.
Some of the swaps sold by U.S. banks were bought by European lenders trying to reduce exposure to the five so-called peripheral countries. Since it’s considered insurance, a German bank can subtract the value of the contracts it purchased on Spanish debt from the total value of its holdings, with the understanding that if Spaindoesn’t make good on its payment, the CDS underwriter will pay instead.
British, German and French banks’ loans to the five countries were reduced by 5 percent in the fourth quarter to $1.33 trillion, according to the BIS data. That was a $73 million decrease compared with the $53 million increase in U.S. banks’ CDS exposure to the periphery.

Spanish Debt

The cost of insuring Spanish sovereign debt increased to a record 552 basis points yesterday, meaning it would cost 552,000 euros ($700,000) to insure 10 million euros of debt from default for five years, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Contracts onItaly’s bonds climbed to a four-month high of 515 basis points. Swaps pay the buyer face value in exchange for the underlying securities or the cash equivalent should a borrower fail to adhere to its debt agreements.
“As the JPMorgan example showed, these are all relative- value trades, and the legs might go in different directions,” said Paul Rowady, a New York-based senior analyst at Tabb Group LLC, a financial-markets research and advisory firm. “It’s not surprising that these relations are being tested today because of the dislocation in credit markets.”
JPMorgan and other banks rely on proprietary models to gauge the risks of such correlations in their derivatives positions. Dimon said last week that some of those models had proven wrong.

Bank Losses

More than half of the CDS related to Spain, Italy and Portugal were to protect defaults by companies in those countries, not the government, according to data compiled by the Depository Trust and Clearing Corp., which runs a central registry for over-the-counter derivatives. About a quarter of the total in each country was protection on bank debt.
As banks in the five countries face mounting losses and funding strains, it’s impossible to model accurately how the risk on different institutions will change, Rowady said. Government and central bank interventions in markets can also upset correlations in those models, he said.
Last week, Spain’s government took control of Bankia SA (BKIA), the country’s third-largest lender, and asked banks to increase provisions for souring real estate loans. Losses of Spanish banks could top 380 billion euros, according to the Centre for European Policy Studies. Moody’s Investors Service downgraded the credit ratings of 16 Spanish banks yesterday and 26 Italian lenders earlier this week.

Counterparty Failure

Counterparty failure is another risk for banks selling insurance on the debt of the five counties. When a swap is triggered by default, a bank could find that a client who sold the protection can’t pay. The firm still has to make good on its promise to pay whoever bought protection.
Lenders try to mitigate this risk by asking for collateral from their counterparties as the value of CDS or other derivative changes. Dexia SA (DEXB) failed in October when the bank faced 47 billion euros of such margin calls on interest-rate swaps it sold. If Dexia hadn’t been bailed out by Belgium and France, it wouldn’t have been able to put up the collateral, causing losses for its unidentified counterparties.
U.S. banks didn’t suffer losses when swaps on Greek sovereign debt were paid out in March because prices of CDS had surged and collateral was collected in advance, according to Francis Longstaff, a finance professor at the University of California Los Angeles. While collateral protects middlemen from counterparty risk, there could be unexpected losses if the price of CDS doesn’t rise to reflect an imminent default, he said.
“Sudden defaults would shock the market because then you wouldn’t have the collateral to cover the full payment,” Longstaff said.
Banks also may discover that collateral they hold might not be worth as much, said University of Houston’s Pirrong. That happened in 2008 when banks saw the value of mortgage-related securities held as collateral plummet.
“Collateral is a great way to protect yourself,” Pirrong said. “But when the financial system is in a crisis, you might end up holding an empty bag.”

and......



http://informationarbitrage.com/post/23227611033/ltcm-amaranth-jp-morgan


LTCM. Amaranth. JP Morgan?

Will Jamie Dimon go down in history as the John Meriwether of this generation? Or perhaps the Nick Maounis of our time? Either metaphor can’t make the current CEO of JP Morgan feel very good about his legacy. And if I understand the trade properly, the end of the story is nowhere near being written
Banks hedge risks. This is what they are supposed to do. And when they don’t, the results have been disastrous (see: the failure of the S&Ls when their long-dated mortgage books were suddenly funded with short term, de-regulated deposits in the sharply rising rate environment of the 1970s). The best way to hedge is always through the cash markets, e.g., I loan out money for a period of time and assume credit risk, interest rate risk, liquidity risk and timing risk, but match fund the loan and mitigate three of the four risks (with only credit risk remaining, the precise thing that banks should get paid to do). The problem is, with the scale of banks and the increasing range and complexity of both business and retail products, match funding is a thing of the past. This risk gap is generally managed using derivatives. There is nothing inherently wrong with this.
However, problems arise when hedging strategies become excessively complex in their attempt to be as close to costless as possible and overly precise. As a long-time risk manager, the goal should be to mitigate risk to an acceptable level but to place a premium on hedge liquidity, transparency and simplicity. While a hedge might effectively hedge “delta” but not “gamma,” the best way to address this is to simply take on less gamma, not try to construct a sickeningly complex and illiquid hedge that models out beautifully but is essentially a custom suit on a person whose weight fluctuates wildly. Sometimes the suit fits, sometimes it looks like crap. And in JP Morgan’s case, they are sporting one of the ugliest suits we’ve seen in quite some time.
It actually reminds me a lot of LTCM. Super smart team. Could likely have put a man on the moon all by themselves. However, the bridge between theory and practice broke down in such a way that the global financial system was clearly at risk. Over a trillion dollars of notional risk supported by less than $5 billion of capital. And the strategies broke down in spectacular fashion because of what? Lack of liquidity and rising correlations. Hmm, lack of liquidity and rising correlations…that sounds a lot like what JP Morgan is facing at this very minute. And there is one other dimension that hastened LTCM’s decline and why the JP Morgan story isn’t close to being done - market knowledge. Once the market knew that LTCM was in trouble, the leaned hard against their positions until they cracked. Now LTCM’s capital base is a tiny fraction of JP Morgan’s, but what if $2 billion turned into $5 billion? Or $10 billion? Every sophisticated market participant is causing JP Morgan maximum pain, and it is simply a question of high-stakes poker. But let me assure you, JP Morgan is not holding many cards right now. 
The JP Morgan debacle also reminds me of Amaranth. While Nick Maounis didn’t run the firm-destroying natural gas trade (a trader named Brian Hunter did), he certainly must have known about it and if he didn’t, he should have known about it. There was a total breakdown of communication, risk management and accountability. Regardless of whether the Managing Partner made the trades, what does it say about their culture that a trader was allowed to put a bet-the-shop position on of that magnitude that blew through billions of dollars of LP capital? One could say the same thing about JP Morgan, Jamie Dimon and the CIO’s office. While the transactions in question may have been for hedging purposes, the risk rebalancing exercise rapidly grew to a scale that placed the firm’s capital position at risk. That this was allowed to continue in the face of rising market awareness (which serves to exacerbate the problem) is incomprehensible, at least to this former Wall Streeter.
I understand why Dimon continues to lobby against the strictest elements of the Volcker Rule, because banks should be allowed and, in fact, have to be allowed, to hedge their books. But when bank managements’ lose sight of the hedging mission and risk management and common sense discipline break down, they shouldn’t be allowed to lead. This is what the Volcker Rule should really be getting at.

and the lapdog that didn't bark.....

http://robertreich.org/post/23172076059



The Dog That Didn’t Bark: Obama on JPMorgan


WEDNESDAY, MAY 16, 2012
The dog that didn’t bark this week, let alone bite, was the President’s response to JP Morgan Chase’s bombshell admission of losing more than $2 billion in risky derivative trades that should never have been made.
“JP Morgan is one of the best-managed banks there is. Jamie Dimon, the head of it, is one of the smartest bankers we got and they still lost $2 billion,” the President said on the television show “The View,” which aired Tuesday, suggesting that a weaker bank might not have survived.
That was it.
Not a word about Jamie Dimon’s tireless campaign to eviscerate the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill; his loud and repeated charge that the Street’s near meltdown in 2008 didn’t warrant more financial regulation; his leadership of Wall Street’s brazen lobbying campaign to delay the Volcker Rule under Dodd-Frank, which is still delayed; and his efforts to make that rule meaningless by widening a loophole allowing banks to use commercial deposits to “hedge” (that is, make offsetting bets) their derivative trades.
Nor any mention Dimon’s outrageous flaunting of Dodd-Frank and of the Volcker Rule by setting up a special division in the bank to make huge (and hugely profitable, when the bets paid off) derivative trades disguised as hedges.  

Nor Dimon’s dual role as both chairman and CEO of JPMorgan (frowned on my experts in corporate governance) for which he collected a whopping $23 million this year, and $23 million in 2010 and 2011 in addition to a $17 million bonus.

Even if Obama didn’t want to criticize Dimon, at the very least he could have used the occasion to come out squarely in favor of tougher financial regulation. It’s the perfect time for him to call for resurrecting the Glass-Steagall Act, of which the Volcker Rule – with its giant loophole for hedges — is a pale and inadequate substitute.
And for breaking up the biggest banks and setting a cap on their size, as the Dallas branch of the Federal Reserve recommended several weeks ago.
Wall Street’s biggest banks were too big to fail before the bailout. Now, led by JP Morgan Chase, they’re even bigger. Twenty years ago, the 10 largest banks on the Street held 10 percent of America’s total bank assets. Now they hold over 70 percent.
This would give Obama a perfect way to distinguish himself from Mitt Romney — who has pledged to repeal Dodd-Frank altogether if he’s elected President, who has also been raking in more than $20 million a year through financial games, and who shares the same prevailing Wall Street view of the economy as profits to be maximized while people are minimized (to Romney, corporations are people).
But the Obama campaign has so far chosen to attack Romney’s character rather than his place in the new American plutocracy, with ads highlighting the jobs that were lost when Romney, as head of Bain Capital, took over a Midwest steel company.
It’s the same personal attack Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry leveled at Romney. But Gingrich and Perry had little choice. They didn’t want to criticize the system that allowed Romney to do this because their party celebrates no-holds-barred free-market capitalism.
Obama does have a choice. He can assail Romney’s character but he can also take on the system that allows private-equity managers, as well as Wall Street’s biggest banks, to continue to make huge profits at the expense of average Americans. Romney is the poster-child for the excesses of that system, just as is Jamie Dimon and JPMorgan Chase.   
We are still at the very early stages of the 2012 campaign. There’s still time for Obama to come out swinging – not only at Romney but also at the system of which Romney is a part, and to base his campaign on policies that will make that system work for ordinary people.  Let’s hope he does.
and.....

http://ftalphaville.ft.com/blog/2012/05/17/998981/the-high-yield-tranche-piece/


[JPM Whale-Watching Tour] The high yield tranche piece


Coverage of the 
$2bn
 $3bn loss emanating from JPMorgan’s Chief Investment Office on its synthetic credit portfolio continues a pace, and FT Alphaville’s tour continues too.
The desire to understand what the trade was and the rationale behind it continues to bug us and many others. Interestingly, some of the discussion of late has come full circle. Bloomberg kicked off the London Whale saga on April 6th, and their follow-up on April 9th contained a detail that has now come back into the narrative. This time, though, it’s more than a mere sidenote — more on this in a minute.
While these more recent explanations are satisfying, we’re still scratching our heads a bit.
The challenge remains: to find trades that have managed to deteriorate with the speed that CEO Jamie Dimon has claimed they have — small in the first quarter, $2bn “all in the second quarter”, and “it kind of grew as the quarter went on”.
Now, credit tranches, which are leveraged positions on credit indices that themselves already involve a lot of leverage, could do this if the model used to determine hedge ratios wasn’t up to the task or if the trades were just outright foolish.
There’s also this, as Tracy Alloway and Sam Jones in wrote in Thursday’s FT:

Even now, the magnitude of JPMorgan’s loss remains something of a mystery to hedge funds. There are rumours that Mr Iksil’s positionsmay be masking other losses elsewhere within the CIO.

Makes you go hmmm, doesn’t it?
Back to some of that original Bloomberg coverage for a moment, when the “London Whale” was first brought to the world’s attention. There was a snippet in their report about the CIO making a profitable call in the fall of 2011 on Markit CDX.NA.HY tranches (NA = North America, HY = High Yield). These trades paid out when Dynegy and American Airlines’ parent, AMR Corp, defaulted:
When a group of hedge-fund traders last year bet that a cluster of companies in one of the indexes wouldn’t default before contracts expired in December, Iksil was taking the opposite view, according to four market participants at hedge funds and banks, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they aren’t authorized to discuss the transactions.
Iksil’s bet won out, and the hedge funds faced losses of 25 percent, when American Airlines parent AMR Corp. filed for bankruptcy less than a month before the insurance-like swaps matured, the market participants said. The trades were made in so-called tranches of the index, which take concentrated risks on the member companies.

The WSJ is saying the same in their story this Thursday, May 17th — that the contracts expired in December. The FT story doesn’t say when the contracts expired.

The gist of all the stories is that the CIO was selling protection on the CDX.NA.IG.9 (going long) to balance out the tranches on the high yield index that they’d bought (going short, which turned out to be profitable when Dynegy and AMR Corp defaulted).
In this way the trade would be both a curve play and across indices — one high yield, one investment grade, with the high yield play levered further because it was a tranche. The long on the IG.9 also would have helped to fund the rather expensive short on the high yield tranches.
It’s possible that not all of the CIO’s tranches, on which they bought protection, matured in December. There’s no way to know, as one has to rely on the veracity of reports from market participants. The WSJ story does, however, point the finger at the CDX.NA.HY.11, and from the DTCC data it looks like they have a point:
That’s quite a big drop in the week ending December 23rd. However, the companies that defaulted are in other high yield indices too. The Series 10 of the same index did not have a similar drop.
It’s clear that something motivated the CIO to continue to sell protection on the investment grade index, with a maturity in December 2017 (the “10-year” because of when the index launched, in September 2009), into this year, which kept the index cheap compared to its underlying constituents.
But if there is one thing that is clear, it’s that it is impossible for the CIO to have lost 
$2bn
 $3bn on that index position alone. Furthermore if the CIO actually did still have short high yield positions on right now, they’d likely be performing well, not poorly, given the increase in systemic risk out of Europe and deteriorating credit environment generally. But, as the FT pointed out on Wednesday, it may well be the case that the hedge ratio between the index and tranches wasn’t correct or that it simply became impossible for the CIO to rebalance.
Show me the losses
Calculators out. The Markit CDX.NA.IG.9 currently has a gross notional outstanding of $795bn (which is $32bn less than it was a week before so someone might have taken some trades off, cough, cough) and a net notional of $146bn (constant on the week).
To be generous, let’s say JPMorgan has a fifth of the gross notional number, $160bn. This might not be generous enough but, hell, we’re all guessing here.
Give $80bn to the credit desk, which leaves $80bn for the CIO. Then assume something like the following, which is effectively a net long North American credit because the buy position on the short end is too small to be anything like hedged (you may imagine it’s high yield instead of investment grade at the 5-year which would serve to amplify the gains):
Sell $30bn of 10-year
From the March 21st low of 106bps to the April 10th high of 130bps, this position would have lost roughly $400m. From the same March 21st low to Wednesday’s close of 150bp, this position would have lost roughly $700m. “Rough” because we’re just using durations.
Buy $50bn of 5-year*
Even with raging incompetence on one’s side, there has to be some other side to the trade. It could all be in tranches, but for the sake of argument — and stubbornly in keeping with our curve-flattener-hedge-turned-bullish-long theory — let’s say there was some short position on the short end of the index.
This position would have been up roughly $54m from March 21st to April 10th, and up $68m by May 16th.
For reference:
As can been seen from the above cowboy math, there is something else going on here as it would be pretty hard to impossible for JPMorgan’s CIO to amass a big enough sell position at the 10-year point on the index alone to get to $2bn of losses.
Hence one has to look to other indices, e.g. high yield; and/or tranches on those. What were these “flawed, complex, poorly reviewed, poorly executed and poorly monitored” strategies that were meant to re-hedge the CIO’s insurance against fat tails? Back to Jamie Dimon, on the May 10th call:
I know it was done with the intention to hedge the tail risk for JPMorgan, but I am telling you, it morphed over time and the new strategy which was meant to reduce the hedge overall made it more complex, more risky and it was unbelievably ineffective.
So we are back to where a lot of the hedge funds are: as Tracy and Sam reported, “JPMorgan’s loss remains something of a mystery”.
More to follow on Friday.
_______
* $50bn on the 5-year to $30bn 10-year is a woefully pathetic ratio, i.e. this is way too small to be called a delta hedge, i.e. a hedge that would immunise the overall trade to small changes in index levels. This supports two theories: 1) the buy was really just a tail-hedge for jump-to-default risk and wasn’t meant to be a hedge against index movements at all, and 2) this leg was indeed more about tranches but, again, those would perform well, and so make it harder to get to the $2bn loss number.

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