Strangely enough, in the old days (as in say, 2000) when a company sent out bad news and then a few weeks later delivered an update with even worse news, their stock prices would be crushed. Investors would run to someone else who could at least get their numbers straight. Today, not so much. Morgan Stanley coughed up a little, ahem, update to their fourth quarter numbers. Worse still, the quarter still isn't over.
Morgan Stanley may face a fiscal fourth-quarter write-down of as much as $5.7 billion for mortgage-related losses, CNBC has learned.
The pretax amount is $2 billion higher than the amount the Wall Street company said it will write down for mortgage-related trading losses in September and October. Morgan Stanley's fiscal fourth quarter ends this month.
