We (will) continue to make community reinvestment an integral part of our ongoing business plan.

This combination helps to further diversify our balance sheet and earnings by adding attractive, high-yielding credit card assets, while improving our net interest margin and adding stable fee income.

Despite the challenging environment, especially in the home loans business, we delivered solid performance, achieving 12 percent earnings per share growth for the quarter and 14 percent for the year.

We are very pleased with our first quarter results. The company's strong performance demonstrates the benefits of our continued diversification and enhanced operational focus. This past quarter we had particularly strong results in Retail Banking and Card Services.

Adding core mortgage relationships.

This is a landmark day for Washington Mutual and for our industry.

With this move, Washington Mutual?already the second largest home lender in New York?acquires a broad retail footprint to complement our existing mortgage business.

This acquisition is a logical step in continuing our effort to build out our mortgage business and its increase fee income without acquiring additional mortgage servicing rights.

This was a disappointing quarter. While second-quarter results were affected by the volatility of our mortgage servicing rights, the root of our problem is the unacceptably high cost structure in our mortgage banking business. We know what we need to do, our efforts are well under way, and we will not be satisfied until we have fixed it.