Christopher Brendler (Stifel Nicolaus & Company, Inc.): Could you give us a little more color on what you are seeing in the charge card business?
Daniel T. Henry: We did see a little bit of change in the credit metrics, and we did see some movement from a credit metric perspective. We think the impact will be less there than on the lending side. Going forward in terms of our ability to manage the charge card portfolio, we are basically making a decision about whether we let that charge go through or not.
Sanjay Sakhrani (Keefe, Bruyette & Woods): Is there a specific region that saw more improvement than others?
Daniel T. Henry: I think it was pretty broad based, although I will remind you that last year we probably had higher credit losses in the U.K. and possibly in Taiwan as well.
Sanjay Sakhrani (Keefe, Bruyette & Woods): In the marketing line, are the one-times a boost in incremental business building costs. Is that in the rewards line?
Daniel T. Henry: So the line in the P&L is marketing, promotions and rewards. The incremental boost in the fourth quarter would be on that line.
Robert Napoli (Piper Jaffray): On the marketing spend, the $2.7 billion that you spent this year, if you back out the $685, you are at $2 billion. Is it slightly less than the $2 billion you expect to spend in 2008?
Daniel T. Henry: The $2.7 billion is a quarterly number that is both marketing promotion and rewards, including the $685 million.
Robert Napoli (Piper Jaffray): So looking at the full year, including the $685, you expect to spend a little bit less than that?
Daniel T. Henry: No. In 2008 we think we will spend slightly less than what we spent in 2007.So I was not addressing the $2.7 billion in the quarter.
Robert Napoli (Piper Jaffray): On the 4% to 6% earnings per share growth, is that on the $3.42, on top of the $3.42 from continuing operations?
Daniel T. Henry: I think $3.39 is our continuing operations diluted earnings per share, and the 4% to 6% on a reported basis would be offset in the $3.39 number.
Scott Valentin (Friedman, Billings, Ramsey & Co.): Can you talk a little bit more about small business credit metrics?
Daniel T. Henry: In prior slowdowns, we have seen that small business was kind of a leading indicator. In 2007 that was not the case. We saw a sudden drop in December in the U.S. of both consumer and small business, so small business behaved very similar to what we saw in the Consumer segment in the month of December.
Scott Valentin (Friedman, Billings, Ramsey & Co.): Regarding the tax rate, I guess it was 27% for the year in 2007 and about 30% in 2006. Do you see it holding stable about where it is today?
Daniel T. Henry: We would normally expect our tax rate to be around 30% or 31%. This year there were a number of tax benefits that we realized in the earlier quarters. We broke those out separately. We had a gain of $65 million related to an IRS settlement, and we also had a tax benefit in the third quarter of about $75 million.
Against that we did some investment spending in the second quarter, but those two large benefits that were recorded in the second and third quarter is what really took us down below that 30% or 31%.
Brad Ball (Citigroup): Is there any reason for the decline in the discount rate quarter-to-quarter besides the seasonality?
Daniel T. Henry: No. We saw the normal 300 basis point drop - or 3 basis point drop from the third quarter to the fourth quarter, which is seasonal. We did see a slight drop year-over-year of 1 basis point from last year to this year. |