Larry Donald Zimpleman
Analyst · Eric Berg with RBC
Sure. A good question. And I think Terry actually covered that, at least, briefly, but I think reasonably well, right at the end of his commentary. Where we're sitting at today, as you observed, is right at that sort of 9.8%, 9.9% level that is consistent with where it was a year ago. And in answer to your question about why it has not improved, there's really 2 things that have impacted that in a pretty significant way. One of those was the actuarial assumption review that we did in third quarter 2012 was one factor. And the other factor is the purchase of Cuprum, where, again, just the way the accounting works when you buy an asset at greater than book value, it's going to have a depressing impact on ROE. If you sort of adjust for those, because those, again, are kind of temporary issues, that's about 100 basis points. So if you ask me today, Eric, what I would tell you is, I believe that we've moved our ROE over the last 12 months, roughly from 9.9% into that high 10% level. And I think, honestly, if you just look at that ROE level, near 11% today, say, between 10 3/4% and 11%, in a environment with a 1.7% 10-year treasury, that's actually a pretty respectable ROE. And I think it does lend credence to the fact that our fee-based model will allow us to generate higher ROEs over time. So we're roughly at 11% today. Going forward, we still expect to be able to achieve that sort of 50 to 80 basis point sort of improvement in ROE. So I think expectations would be, again, all other things being equal, no particular macroeconomic events, no particular issues relative to acquisitions, we'd be in that 11.5% sort of range by the end of the year. Does that give you a good picture?