“Along the way, we believe our expected earnings generation over the next 18 months will provide an ample amount of capital, which allows us to support customer growth, pay dividends and use the rest to allocate between buying back shares and growing into our new capital requirement.”

In context

“anaged to keep expenses flat to the first quarter and in line with what we told you. We continue to drive strong operating leverage in a weaker capital markets environment. These earnings are delivering strong returns and delivering capital back to shareholders. And thinking about capital, remember, first, we use our capital to support customers and related loans, and we continue to invest in the franchise. Second, we are delivering capital back to you, shareholders. We announced our intent to increase our dividend in quarter 3, which we have our dividend 22% higher than it was just 12 months ago. In addition, we retired shares this quarter. Third, we're going to be building capital given the new higher amounts received during the stress test. It will make our balance sheet even stronger. Along the way, we believe our expected earnings generation over the next 18 months will provide an ample amount of capital, which allows us to support customer growth, pay dividends and use the rest to allocate between buying back shares and growing into our new capital requirement. And with that, I'll turn it over to Alastair. Alastair Borthwick: Thank you, Brian. And since Brian hit the highlights of the income statement, I just want to reiterate, we saw good returns in the quarter with a return on tangible common equity of 14% and return on assets of 79 basis points. So I'm going to begin my comments on Slide 7 and the balance sheet. And as you can see, during the quarter, the balance sheet declined $127 billion to a little more than $3.1 trillion, and that reflected an $88 billion decline in deposits and a decrease in our Global Markets balance sheet. We utilized a combination of cash and some rotation from securities this quarter to fund our loans growth given the decline in deposits. Our average liquidity portfolio declined in the quarter, reflecting a drop in”