Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions). Your first question comes from the line of Mike Vinciquerra of BMO Capital Markets.
Michael Vinciquerra - BMO Capital Markets
Thank you, good afternoon guys. One question for you just on the balance sheet itself the interest earning assets; it looks like you're putting a lot at the cash that's coming in from clients directly into cash any equivalents. Can you talk about your ability to I guess redeploy the cash that continues to come in from your clients as by the low rates you're now offering?
Donald ACIS, LLB
Yes. We have weighted banking would normally be considered a good problem. We have a large amount of liability deposits and we don't need them as the asset wise of the loan portfolio shrinks. We are working on various strategies and actions to reduce the liabilities and so in the mean time, we intend to put the money temporarily at risk at cash or near cash equivalents with some very low risk situation that we have been reluctant to put them into any kind of medium term, low credit risk, but medium term interest credit risk situation such as three year or five year mortgage backed security, guarantee by Fannie or Freddie. So we've had extra cash pile up on the asset side as we work on these plans to reduce liabilities.
You should know that are plans to reduce liabilities is most obvious one is that we reduced significantly over the year and most recently even earlier this quarter, fourth quarter our primary savings brokerage rate our main CSA rate to 50 basis points; direct bank deposits from retail are declining, but the brokerage business itself is doing so well that sweep deposits and related types things like that like free credits have been growing nicely; what you'll expect to see going forward is reducing liabilities some, reducing that excess cash on the balance sheet and getting that cash lower.
These two buckets of cash, one is just general bank cash, our target there is to get down to under 2 billion, closer to $1 billion. This may take a quarter or two to do. And we also have restricted cash related to free credits. We'll be working on reducing that as well.
Michael Vinciquerra - BMO Capital Markets
Very good. Thank you for that. And then just one question on the credit side; it looks like you guys have built a pretty formidable reserve against at the home equity portfolio because of that the drop in the total balance is there. Is it reasonable to expect that earlier you said that the provision should start to come down, but almost in fact we should see a pretty significant potential reduction in provision, at least on that book over the next couple of quarters?
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