Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
Thank you. (Operator instructions) The first question is from Brad Smith from Blackmont Capital. Please go ahead.
Brad Smith – Blackmont Capital
Thanks very much. This is a question for you. Just wondering if you could update us with respect to your thinking about the US growth opportunities that you’re seeing and maybe just touch a little bit on how you look at the return potential there relative to the risk in contrast that against your Canadian opportunities, which seem to be growing.
Gord Nixon
Yes. I mean, I think that, as everybody is aware, certainly valuations in the US have dropped very dramatically although the US marketplace is not without its challenges and particularly as it relates to the real estate sector. When you look at the retail banking, our first loan commercial banking business in the United States, there is equity market values and then there is real value when you look at the balance sheets and the loan books and the mark-to-markets. And I would say that we look at the US with a tremendous amount of caution, given the current operating environment, but we also want to be positioned to take advantage of opportunities, which sounds a little bit witchy-watchy, but I think it’s very consistent with where we’ve been for quite sometime where we are willing to look into explore opportunities, but we certainly don’t want to do anything that’s going to compromise the financial strength and the performance of the organization. And there are still a lot of challenges when you look at investment opportunities in that marketplace. And I would also say, which I’ve said many times before, is while US banking gets a lot of attention because of what’s going on there, we continue to look at opportunities across all of our businesses and a lot of businesses are finding opportunities to invest capital at very good rates of written and whether that’s in banking outside of the United States like RBTT, PH&N, some of the smaller investments we’ve made this past quarter, the acquisition in Houston, the leasing business from ABN AMRO. I mean, we’ve got a pretty I think aggressive but disciplined approach in terms of looking at ways where we can invest capital wisely and take advantages of opportunities given the turmoil and it’s not all related to US banking. So I would say, we will continue to be very cautious with respect to that market, but at the same time, we are paying a lot of attention to what’s going on.
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