Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the third quarter 2008 earnings call. At this time all, participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. Please note that this conference is being recorded. I'll now turn the call over to Ms. Laura Gagnon. Ms. Gagnon, you may begin.

Thank you. Welcome to the Ameriprise Financial third quarter earnings call. With me on the call today are Jim Cracchiolo, Chairman and CEO, and Walter Berman, Chief Financial Officer. After their remarks we would be happy to you’re your questions. During the call you may hear references to various non-GAAP financial measures which we believe provide insight to the underlying performance of the company's operations, reconciliations to the non-GAAP numbers to respective GAAP numbers can be found in today's material available on our Web site. Some of the statements that we make on this call may be forward-looking statements reflecting management's expectations about future events, operating plans and performance. These forward-looking statements speak only as of today's date and involve a number of risks and uncertainties. A sample list of factors and risks that could cause actual results to be materially different from forward-looking statements can be found in today's earnings release, our 2007 annual report to shareholders, and our 2007, 10K report. We undertake no obligation to update publicly or revise these forward-looking statements. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Jim.

Thank you. Good afternoon everyone. Thanks for joining us to discuss our third quarter results. I'm going to give you an overview of the quarter and where we stand and then Walter will take you through a fair amount of detail of our results and our balance sheet. I don't have to tell you that we're operating in an extremely difficult environment. In fact, this is what out question the most challenging time I've seen for the markets in nearly three decades in the industry. We reached the point when no one is immune to such extraordinary dislocation. The markets clearly impacted us. The 24% year-over-year decline in the S&P 500 through September 30th took a toll on our asset levels and our fees and clearly things have only intensified in October as the S&P is down 20% just this month and is now down 37% for the year. Despite the market affects, our business remains sound, because our model is built around long-term financial planning; our clients are staying the course. Client retention is at a very solid 94%. At the same time, our advisors are working to ease client anxiety over the markets and the reserve fund issue which I'll address shortly. Still with the strong support we provide, advisor satisfaction remains high and our franchisee advisor retention is over 93%. In fact, among almost experienced franchisees retention is at an all-time high of 96%. We're able to weather these times because of decisions we've made and because of strong operating platform we built over the three years since our spin-off. Our enterprise risk management continues to serve us well. We have a high quality investment portfolio as well as strong liquidity and excess capital. I should note that in order to maximize our liquidity in these highly…

Thanks, Jim. In my remarks I'm going to provide more insight into three critical areas. First, our financial and operational results for the quarter, next, the drivers are our financial position and balance sheet strength, and lastly, going forward implications of the current environment. First let's take a look at the quarter. Our net loss of $0.32 per share was driven by the credit market dislocation we experienced in September and the resulting high level of impairments. As Jim told you, in September, we saw the overnight bankruptcies of Lehman Brothers and the takeover of Washington Mutual. These events combined with others significantly impacted liquidity and spreads across the market. As relates to our residential mortgage backed security impairments, we recorded $66 million in after-tax losses which reflected market conditions. We have now impaired all of the AAA-rated mezzanine tranches of our all-day securities backed by option arms. We continue to hold approximately $400 million in non-impaired Super-senior all day securities backed by optional arms, but they're all in the most senior positions in the structures, some with more than 50% subordination. In the quarter, our core operating earnings were $1.04 per share. As Jim indicated earlier, these core results reflected continued strong client and advisor retention. Core operating revenues and earnings included several negative market impacts to only slightly more than $75 million after-tax. First, lower equity markets affected our fee revenue. Second, we have lower net investment income because of the higher levels of liquidity we've chosen to build in this environment and lower fixed annuity balances. Finally, we experienced a mix shift driven by increased risk diversion among our clients which has resulted in lower traditional sales and lower distribution fees. Offsetting these negatives were three positives, which are detailed in our release. First, $40 million net…

Okay, we're ready to take Q&A, operator.

(Operator instructions) Our first question comes from Suneet Kamath. Please go ahead. Suneet Kamath – Sanford C. Bernstein: Thank you very much. Just a couple questions on capital. Walter, you had said that your risk-based capital ratio I guess at the end of '08 will be above what you need for AA rating. I think end of last year it was well above that, close to 700%. Can you give us any sense – I know some companies have been given a sense of approximately where that would be as of third quarter-end. Can you give us a sense of that? And then sort of related, in terms of stopping the buy back program, obviously, you've done a couple acquisitions, should we assume really other than the dividend, no capital redeployment going forward, including – inclusive of acquisitions and then related, what should we be looking at? Is it the credit markets? Or the equity markets? What will give us a sign of when you might get back into the market to buy your own stock considering the valuation right now? Thanks.

Okay. As you know, the RBC calculation is well – you can do it at the end of the third quarter. You still have to run through your tests for your C3 Phase II. We've preliminary run it and it's in excess of 450, but again, that's a preliminary run before we complete the C3 Phase II. It was at 700 and we have declared dividends which we moved to the parent and which we've discussed in previous calls. As it relates to the question about resuming, at this particular stage, based upon the credit and liquidity, we really don't see us getting back until we see improvement in those markets and on that basis, we just going to hold off how to drive until we feel comfortable from that standpoint. We do have excess liquidity as we talked about and excess capital position. As far as acquisitions, interesting times right now, we want to make sure that we're protecting what we have and we'll have to be in a very exceptional situation.

We still feel we're in a very good position. I know many of you have questioned and think about the asset-owned portfolios of many companies. So we want to be very clear that we feel we're in a good position, we don't need equity, we don't need to go out for financing. We have a strong position of excess capital, and we'll just look and monitor the markets and when things start to ease up and people feel more comfortable, then we'll have degrees of freedom again.

(Operator instructions) We have no further questions.

This is Laura Gagnon. We'll be in my office available for your questions later on this evening. That number is 612-671-2080. Thank you, operator.

Thank you, everyone.

Thanks.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. This concludes today's conference. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.