the new york times" that shortly after the deal was announced in september, b of a a had quickly unstalled 200 people at merrill lynch to thoroughly review their books. were any of the 200 bank of america employees responsible for analyzing merrill lynch aware of the potential for the $12 billion loss before you legendly discovered it in mid december? >> -- we did have people there and we did know that there were losses and that was clear both in our company and theirs. we can see that that was happening and there were rumors on the street that that was happening across all finance institutions and we saw evidence of that after the fourth quarter close because we saw most everybody had losses. the thing that caused us to be concerned was the acceleration that we saw when we got the numbers that we did on the 14th. >> did you feel that the reviews of merrill lynch's books were thoroughly adequate? were they resaerchd analyzed adequately? >> yes, ma'am, i thought the due diligence was done adequately. we identified the instruments that we thought might have issues, if you have credit deterio