Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
Your first question comes from the line of Jimmy Bhullar – JP Morgan
Jimmy Bhullar – JP Morgan
I just have a few questions, the first one is on your guidance, you had given guidance for 2008 earnings I think $6.50 previously and there wasn’t a number this time and you didn’t mention one on your call, so if you could address your earnings expectations for the rest of the year. The second one is on David Atkinson’s announcement was this planned in advance, if you can just give us some comfort that the earnings release and David’s announcement are not related. And then finally if you could talk about a little bit more detail on the negative mortality this quarter. Was this more of a number of claims issue or you just had more high ticket claims or just give us some more color on what really happened.
Greig Woodring
Okay, we don’t like to get in the habit of really doing quarterly updates of our guidance. Clearly we’re in the hole. Will we hit in that $6.00 to $6.50 range? There is a possibility we will. We’re not ruling that out. We would need to have some good experience the rest of the way. But clearly these things tend to smooth out and usually they smooth out relatively quickly when we have a down quarter like this. That’s been our past experience but that’s not any knowledge about what’s really going to happen this year but our earnings power as imbedded in the book of business is still on a 12-month forward-looking basis – it’s something like $6.00 to $6.50 and we would stand by that from this point forward. But clearly we have to recover about thirty-something cents with better than expected experience to make that up in the current given year.
David’s retirement is something that we’ve been working on for a year and I should probably let him talk about it since he is here today but he’s not completely leaving the company. He’ll still do some work for us and we expect to see him contribute to RGA over the future years although he is relinquishing a lot of his management responsibilities because of the change in status.
David Atkinson
Yes, this is something I’ve been working with Greig on for a couple of years really and probably about a year ago we reached a meeting of the minds and so it has nothing to do with this quarter.
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