to extract enough cash to make the deals profitable, even if the debts prove crushing in the long run. Meanwhile, the Financial Times reports that Morgan Stanley, the investment bank, is taking advantage of the "Bernanke Put" to improve its Basel III capital ratio: Morgan Stanley's change reduced its average VaR in the third quarter to $63m instead of the $82m it would have been under the company's old model. That means under the new model the bank expects to lose no more than $63m in a single trading day, within a certain probability, rather than $82m under the old model. "It all goes to point out, again and again and again, how malleable and manipulable and flaky VaR can be," said Pablo Triana, professor at ESADE Business School. "Just change weights on data and, voila, you are perceived as less risky and you can be more leveraged." Ruth Porat, Morgan Stanley's chief financial officer, said that the bank had changed the VaR model to be more heavily weighted to one-year historical data. The model was previously geared towards four-year data. "We've been running this model and the prior model in parallel since 2011, which gives us a high level of comfort from the model," Ms Porat told analysts Thursday. "It's been approved by regulators." Morgan Stanley used to model risk by looking at trading data from the past four years. They switched to using data from only the past 12 months. This is significant. Morgan Stanley and its regulators,