U.S. Bancorp Earnings Call Nuggets: Higher Period-End Loans and Mortgage Production

U.S. Bancorp (NYSE:USB) recently reported its fourth quarter earnings and discussed the following topics in its earnings conference call.

Higher Period-End Loans

Jon Arfstrom – RBC Capital Markets: Question for you on loan growth, good average loan growth, but it looks like the period-end loans are maybe even a little bit higher, little bit better and curious if there is anything notable about the growth and if you’ve noticed any change in sentiment of the borrowers, maybe positive or negative early on in the year?

Richard K. Davis – Chairman, President and CEO: It’s pretty much the same story, I think the fiscal cliff uncertainty caused the very last couple of weeks to be a bit a muted but if you take quarter four and look in the quarter one, I think at the end of day you’re going to see pretty sustainable range of that 4% to 6% annualized. We came in at the high end of that range in quarter four. I think we’re on track for the high-end of that for quarter one, but I wouldn’t jump outside of that range based on what I am seeing. I don’t think that people cares much about the debt ceiling and the debate that will occur later in the quarter as they do about the bottom line to their pay check as they did about the fiscal cliff. But I don’t think it’s still a fairly uncertain environment and people (first of the year) are jumping on anything new.

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Jon Arfstrom – RBC Capital Markets: Then you touched on it, but maybe if you could provide us a little more color on how you are thinking about capital allocation on 2013? You talked about returning more money to shareholders, but just kind of walk us through your thought process?

Andrew Cecere – VC and CFO: This is Andy. Our goal has always been a 60% to 80% return, the combination of dividends and buybacks. We’re within that range in 2012. We would expect and we plan to be within that range in 2013, that’s how we submitted the CCAR and as I have discussed, we’ll hear back somewhere towards the end of March regarding the results.