But it can all go awry when someone starts arguing against derivatives and just gets it wrong. It makes us do a sad, frowny face and then get incredibly frustrated.

As the bank doesn’t want to give any additional detail on what the restructuring, the below outlines some of the possibilities and the implications thereof. We emphasise that we don’t know which is the case and, again, we did ask Morgan Stanley for comment.

This mysterious little footnote announced to the world that in the fourth quarter, Morgan Stanley managed to arrange a deal that reduced the bank’s net exposure to Italy from $4.9bn to $1.5bn.

That’s according to Bank for International Settlements statistics that were released back in mid-November. Further discussion of the results came out on Monday as part of the BIS’s bigger quarterly review though.

And specifically how things have changed since July.

Luckily Eurostat, in a just-published review of its methodological visits to Greece in 2010, has a quick reminder. More importantly, it’s kind of the European statistic agency’s final word on the matter:

Milan, March 25, 2011 — Moody’s Investors Service has today downgraded the City of Florence’s debt rating by one-notch to Aa3 from Aa2. The rating outlook is negative.

It’s highly technical, but the main point is that swap pricing has changed significantly since the beginning of the crisis, largely because the industry has found itself having to adopt a “double curve-single currency” framework.