What to make of Bank of America's troubles?

It's really an impossible task, even among the most expert analysts and commentators. Even Warren Buffett doesn't know, guesses Business Insider's Henry Blodget, and Buffett just invested $5 billion in B of A. Wall Street, never thrilled with such uncertainty, has been pricing the stock super-low - it was selling at around $6 a share this week before finally recovering (it's now trading at about $7.70). More from Blodget:

Assessing the value of Bank of America's assets is extraordinarily complicated, and Bank of America has not disclosed enough information for even super-sophisticated bank analysts (or Warren Buffett) to reliably do it. Bank of America has published a mind-boggling amount of detail about its assets and business, but according to several professional bank analysts, this is not nearly enough detail for any outsider to really know what's going on.

The monster problem has been - and remains - crappy mortgages inherited from B of A's purchase of Countrywide. Nobody knows the precise worth of those loans, though it's clearly a massive number, perhaps a few hundred billion dollars. Without getting into banker gobbledygook, the question is whether B of A has enough reserves put aside to cover those losses. The general consensus is that it doesn't (even though the company insists that it has everything under control, and several prominent analysts basically concur). From Blodget:

in short, my analyst thinks that banks like Bank of America have huge "embedded" losses in their mortgage portfolios--losses that have yet to be taken as write-offs and, therefore, have yet to hit the banks' capital. These losses, my analyst believes, will eventually inflict themselves on the banks one way or another. Now, importantly, my analyst does not KNOW any of this. The banks are not required to disclose the information necessary for the analyst to precisely determine the actual condition of the banks' whole loans, so it is impossible for the analyst to verify his suspicions. But based on anecdotal information, he is confident that he is right.