Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
Your first question comes from the line of Paul Newsome with Sandler O'Neill.
Paul Newsome - Sandler O'Neill
Good morning. Thanks for the call. I was hoping you could give us just a little bit more color on the Fifth Third sale, in particular. You mentioned it was the first available opportunity. Could you talk about why the sale happened immediately, versus say a thought of holding on until better times come for the financial markets and how you were thinking about that?
Ken Stecher
Well, Paul, I will start and then I will let Marty follow up. Since we were a 10% shareholder, when they were in blackout, we were also in blackout. So which meant that once they decreased their dividend, the blackout existed until the point in time where they released earnings. So that was the timing there.
I think the standpoint of the sale instead of waiting for a recovery, when you look at the enterprise risk management process, and when you look at the size of that position to our overall portfolio and everyone knows how large a position that was relative to our capital base and the real uncertainties in the market. I felt that preservation of capital was a very key thing that we had to address at that point in time.
We saw other bank stocks and you have seen those also, that they did one dividend cut, some of them subsequently followed with a second dividend cut. We're uncertain as to where their dividends might go. Hopefully, it's not going to be changed from the current level, until it starts to reverse and rise again.
But I felt from the capital preservation point of view, I didn't want to take the risk of going down into the single digits. We still have a large position that we still retain, so we will enjoy quite a bit of the upside. So that is my perspective and I will let Marty add any color to that that he would like.
Marty Hollenbeck
I think, Paul, Ken pretty much covered it all right there. I mean it was a risk assessment analysis on our part. The credit crunch, if you will, is still far from over. It is still playing out. So, we were just analyzing the further downside risk and determined that the 32 million plus shares that we were going to hang onto were adequate to participate in that upside, that recovery that we hope ensued.
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