Philip Talamo – IR Peter Kraus – Chairman and CEO David Steyn – COO Bob Joseph – CFO

William Katz – Buckingham Research Group Marc Irizarry – Goldman Sachs Cynthia Mayer – Bank of America/Merrill Lynch Robert Lee – KBW

Thank you, Stephanie. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to our fourth quarter 2009 earnings review.

As a reminder, this conference call is being webcast and is supported by a slide presentation that could be found in the Investor Relations section of our website at www.alliancebernstein.com/investorrelations. Presenting our results today are our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Peter Kraus; our Chief Operating Officer, David Steyn; and our Chief Financial Officer, Bob Joseph.

I would like to take this opportunity to note that some of the information we present today is forward-looking in nature and is subject to certain SEC rules and regulations regarding disclosure. Our cautionary language regarding forward-looking statements can be found on page two of our presentation as well as in the MD&A section of our 2009 10-K, which we expect to file later today.

In light of the SEC's Regulation FD, management is limited to responding to inquiries from investors and analysts in a non-public forum. Therefore we encourage you all to ask questions of material nature on this call.

I'll now hand the call over to Peter.

Thanks very much, Phil. As we’ve noted with all of you in our discussions during the course of the year, ’09 was really about three important things.

One is, restoring performance across our platform, and from that, flows will flow; two, enhancing the operating leveraging and restoring the operating margins in the business, both the average margins and mark to margin contributions; and three, building and enhancing the resource-oriented culture and earning the trust of our clients. We made good progress in all accounts.

I’m going to spend a little bit of time talking about performance, flows, and then turn over to David to go further into the details. You will see on the first slide that we have arrayed the performance for the year, three years, five years, and ten years, and the fourth quarter ’09 for the major value services.

Each of the slides on performance are arranged similarly. The one year performance was outstanding across the board for the US – for the global value services, the international value services, and also positive for the US diversified service.

Turning to the next slide, we look at growth. The US large cap growth broke even, but the GRG product and the international large cap growth, both drove gains for the year.

Importantly, the fourth quarter of ’09 for both GRG and international large cap growth showed significant gains and real progress towards continued performance above the benchmark. On the blend side of the world, solid performance for one year and for the fourth quarter in all major categories, emerging markets leading the parade.

On the institutional fixed income business, outstanding performance in the year across Corporate Bonds, Strategic Core Plus, and Global Plus, all had absolutely excellent years, including the fourth quarter as well. When we look at flows, we still see net outflows for the businesses, although fixed income by the third quarter of ’09 was beginning to reflect some of the positive performance that we had during the year and has continued to show positive flows in that space.

Value, although negative outflows did not have any significant deterioration between the third quarter and the fourth quarter, was slightly better. And growth, pretty much the same picture as value.

Looking at the net flows by distribution channel, we see basic improvement. However, the fourth quarter in the institutional space saw greater outflows in the third quarter However, I’ll let David explain some of the reasons for that.

It will become clear to you that the performance is basically consistent in the third quarter and the fourth quarter.

Thank you, Peter. I’m going to, in the next few minutes; drill down into the business conditions of our three main channels.

And whilst each of them is at a different stage of recovery and is dealing with the different challenges and experiencing a different environment, in my remarks, I hope it will become clear that there are some common denominators to what is going on across our business. The first is the one which Peter has already alluded to.

Improved performance across the board driven by our three global research platforms; value, growth, fixed income. The second common factor or common phenomenon is the sort of renewed sales focus, exploring the depths and breadths of our distribution footprint.

The third one is the greater product innovation or greater focus on product innovation, but of two types. One, filling in the gaps in our product range, the areas where we don’t have the appropriate services.

That’s the obvious one. Perhaps the slightly more subtle one is what I call – we call, the innovative expressions or iterations of our existing outer platforms, but packaging them up into new dynamic products.

So with that said, let me start with our Private Client business. Here, the business momentum has continued to improve in Q4, manifested by the metrics of gross sales and net flows, which you can see in the bullet points and in the graphic at the bottom of the page.

What you can’t see is another metric we follow very closely and which is in our experience a very good indicator of future activity. A key component of our engagement model with high net worth clients and high net worth products is what we call Well Forecasting Analysis, WFA.

WFA is where we analyze the needs of the clients and prospects, their wealth, their philanthropy, their spending patterns, their expectations, their family, et cetera. As I say, a key part, our engagement model, both from 2009 and particularly in second half of 2009, we saw the amount of WFA activity significantly, materially increasing.

In fact, into this year, January’s WFA activity was a record for any January with this firm. Well Forecasting Analysis isn’t just a sort of indicator of engagements of clients and prospects.

It’s also a driver of new business, because it is that process of working with the clients and the prospects and his/her referral sources, which leads to recommendations on asset allocations or rebalancing our selection of managers. So at this point, the WFA activity is looking very positive.

So the business momentum is continuing. That is being matched with the ramping up of our footprint.

To all intents and purposes, we managed the sales force of Private Client business in 2009 to be flat. We ended the year at 292.

We started the year at 299. We’ve managed it in the 290s.

We’ve never in the past given targets for what our FA numbers will be. But I think looking out to 2010, it’s reasonable to assume a high-single digit growth in financial advisors across the United States of America, reflecting the opportunities we see here.

Our next training class starts in March, and we are planning a third further training class in the fall. In my opening comments I mentioned the greater product innovation across all three channels.

And here we list a couple of the things we are working on in Private Clients. A classic example of filling the gaps is the real estate initiative we have announced, an area which in direct real estate this firm has never had exposure in the past.

An example of what I call it innovation, the reiteration of our capabilities and the repackaging of our intellectual capital into new products and new services is a very important initiative in Private Clients called dynamic asset allocation, an approach which is designed to manage risk, adjusting client asset allocation dynamically in response to forecast changes in market conditions. We are just in the process of rolling this out to our private clients, and the initial feedback has been very, very positive.

Let me turn to the very last point here, which is rather oblique or opaque to continue to advance client service excellence through operational efficiencies. This is an example of what Peter alluded to in his opening remarks about restoring operational and financial leverage to our business.

What this actually means is a project underway, re-engineering the way we service our private clients, taking operational functions out of our Private Client department and embedding it back into our operations department both here in the United States of America and offshore in India. The purpose of this is two-fold.

One, it is to have a center of excellence, leverage that center of excellence in the way we service our clients. So there is a second level rationale here.

It is also just to our pipeline of associates so that they can do more value-added functions, client facing functions, well forecasting analysis, to give us leverage within the Private Client distribution side. Let me turn to retail.

In some senses, the picture in retail is similar. Business momentum has continued to move in the right direction, manifested both with gross sales and net flows.

Now, over the past couple of quarters, the earnings reviews, I’ve talked about tale of two cities in retail. I’ve talked about us having essentially two businesses and they were experiencing two-way different environments, with mutual fund activity improving particularly in Asia and particularly in fixed income, following a strategic move into fixed income a couple of years ago.

But the sub-advisory business facing headwinds. Our sub-advisory business being a quasi institutional business.

But risk of extending the metaphor to breaking point is probably no longer tale of two cities, but a tale of three cities. Mutual fund activity worldwide continues to exhibit the patterns of behavior we’ve been talking about for the past two quarters.

High growth in fixed income, high growth outside the United States of America, but in an improving environment here in the United States. It is the sub-advisory business, which is sort of bifurcated into two cities.

The US sub-advisory business continuing to face the headwinds I’ve been talking about over the last two quarters. But encouragingly, the non-US sub-advisory business is beginning to look much more robust, with particularly improved environment in Europe and in Japan.

In the same way, as I indicated that the Private Client channel exhibited the fruits – was exhibiting the fruits of our move into new product innovation. Exactly the same phenomenon is happening in our Retail channel; some of the same products, dynamic asset allocation, inflation protection strategies.

Dynamic asset allocation already planned to be rolled out. Inflation strategies starting to be rolled out.

So as we look forward, the picture for the retail businesses is encouraging. A very strong pipeline encouraged – being driven by improved performance, improved product suite or broader product suite, and re-engagements in the sub-advisory channel in the non-US parts of the world.

So if Private Clients and Retail are both being characterized by continuation of the trend towards a better and healthy environment, Institutions continues to face the challenges of 2009. Now, Peter said I would reference the outflows, which occurred in the fourth quarter.

Fourth quarter outflows increased 56% sequentially. However, one part of that outflow was cash flow of approximately $5 billion from a non-actively managed account, the revenue attached to which was de minimus.

So then moving to the institutional business environment, here I will circle back to what Peter said. This obviously is going to be a performance story.

Peter talked about the improved 2009 performance against the index. Let me put that into a context against the competition.

Of the 12 services Peter referenced, nine were in the top half of overall nine against the competition; four of those nine in the top quarter. And if we look against the index in a more broader basis, and the data here is included in the appendix of the deck in front of you, eight out of eight value services outperformed the index; seven out of nine, growth services; four out of four, blend; six out of six, fixed income.

It’s appropriate for me to end our list with fixed income, because just as the retail channel made a strategic move to prioritize the fixed income a couple of years ago, so did the institutional channel, which has borne fruit with a high level of interest in fixed income globally and globally. What I mean by globally and globally is the clients globally and for global fixed income.

And certainly, as we look at the pipeline right now, those are amongst the most interesting – some of the most interesting opportunities. Looking at client segments, we see high level of interest and activity from sovereign funds and central banks.

And in that context, it was gratifying to see the Washington press release announcing that of the nine PPIP managers, AllianceBernstein had raised the most assets. So let me turn from the buy-side to the sell-side, what we call here Bernstein Research highlights.

4Q year-over-year, revenue was down 8%. ’09 revenue year-over-year is down 8% compared to a record 2008.

The story behind this data is really much stronger. Our best estimate of global secondary commission pool is that it is down more than 30%.

So both our business in the United States of America and our business in Europe have enjoyed very significant market share gains. Driving the market share gains are two things.

The first is our footprint. I talked about the Private Client business footprint being the advisors we have dotted around the world of the United States.

The comparable footprints of the sell-side are the publishing analysts we have. Today we have publishing analysts, 29 in the United States, 20 in Europe, three in Asia, which is the largest number we’ve ever had.

It is also the highest ranked publishing analyst force we’ve ever had. So that is one metric, the subscribing market share gain.

The second is the service suite we are able to offer our clients where recent investments and products such as European electronic trading, equity derivatives, equity capital markets, have all borne fruit. So if I look back at the sell-side business the past couple of years, it has – the story has been one of the broadening out into Europe and the broadening out into service suites of our capabilities.

If I look forward to next two years, it is the continuation of that process in Asia. I mentioned that we have three publishing analysts in Asia today.

We expect to end the year with four. We expect to have a critical mass of publishing analysts by the end of 2011, critical mass of publishing analysts, which should be matched by critical mass of trading and sales capabilities.

And the last comment I make on Bernstein Research is that to a very significant extent, in the past when we don’t talk and comment on, it is a great brand enhancement for the group as a whole. Interestingly, in January of this year, in all media around the around, they were just under 2,900 references to our Sanford C.

Bernstein. So I’ve commented on the channels and the sell-side of our business.

Let me close my comments by saying a little about the firm as a whole. Peter mentioned the three tasks, which lay ahead of us in 2009.

One, which was to restore operating and financial leverage to the company for the benefit of unitholders and staff. One key, if not the key, metric of this is headcount.

And in the past couple of earnings calls we’ve been showing you how headcount has changed from its peak in the third quarter ’08, we’re down 23%. From the beginning of ’09, we are down 13%.

Now in my last earnings call, I said that year-end we should expect a number 4,400-and-change. This shows 4,369.

That doesn’t mean we decided to go further than 4,400-and-change. At year-end there were some 50-odd positions, which were in the process of being filled.

So I continue to stand by what I said three months ago. You should think in terms of the headcount of this firm of 4,400-and-change.

So with that, let me hand over to Bob to run through the financials.

Okay. Thanks, David.

So as we reported today and as shown on the next slide, net income attributable to AllianceBernstein unitholders for the fourth quarter of 2009 was $192 million, more than the $92 million earned in the fourth quarter of 2008. Operating income increased by 180%, driven by a 35% increase in net revenues and also by a 14% increase in operating expenses.

Our operating margin increased to 25.7% from 16.2% for the fourth quarter of 2008. Although a significant portion of this improvement is due to a large positive variance in deferred compensation investment gains and losses, which I’ll discuss later, the remainder is attributable to improve operating results.

While on this slide, I’d like to point out that the operating partnership’s effective tax rate declined to 6.8% compared to 9.8% for the last year’s fourth quarter, as a higher proportion of our consolidated pretax earnings was generated from the operations of our US partnership. This mix shift also explains a similar decline in the tax rate for the full year.

Fourth quarter 2009 diluted net income per unit and the distribution per unit for AllianceBernstein Holding, the publicly traded partnership, were both $0.62, each more than double that of the prior year quarter. Moving to the full year 2009, net revenues and operating expense for the operating partnership declined 17% and 11% respectively compared to full year 2008, resulting in a 36% decline in operating income.

Finally, full year diluted net income per unit for both the operating partnership and AllianceBernstein Holding declined by 35%. The next slide provides details of the $201 million or 35% increase in net revenues of the operating partnership.

Base fees increased by $14 million or 3% due to higher retail fee revenue, which is partially offset by modest declines in our other buy-side distribution channels. In addition, we accrued $16 million performance fees this quarter with approximately 60% from hedge funds distributed in our Private Client channel and 40% from long holding [ph] Institutions client accounts.

Distribution revenues, which are based on average mutual fund assets under management increased by $17 million or 25% year-over-year, roughly in line with the increase in retail AUM. However, this increase is largely offset by higher asset under management based distribution plan payments included in promotion and servicing expenses.

As David already discussed, Bernstein Research Services revenues fell 8% from the prior year quarter to $109 million. Note that recent investments, as he mentioned, in equity derivatives and equity capital market services contributed approximately $6 million to current quarter revenues.

The primarily driver of the quarter-over-quarter increase in net revenues was $176 million positive variance in investment gains and losses. The majority of this variance was caused by $15 million in mark-to-market gains in the current quarter on investments related to deferred compensation awards compared to $132 of losses in last year’s fourth quarter.

More on that later. Also contributing was a $23 million positive variance in investment losses in our consolidated venture capital fund from $25 million loss in the fourth quarter of 2008 to $2 million loss in the current quarter.

Moving on to operating expenses, promotional and servicing expenses increased by $15 million or 14% from the fourth quarter of 2008 due to higher distribution plan payments associated with higher average mutual fund assets under management. Other expenses in this category were essentially flat versus the prior year quarter.

General and administrative expenses were up, flat quarter-over-quarter as lower technology and occupancy costs were offset by lower foreign exchange gains. Additionally, the current quarter benefited from a $9 million reimbursement for claims accrued in the second quarter of 2009.

As noted last quarter, we currently estimate that the run rate for general and admin expenses $144 per quarter. The next slide provides some additional information on our compensation and benefits expense, including the $59 million or 22% increase from quarter-over-quarter.

The $45 million or 28 % decline in base compensation has to significant components. Base salaries declined $8 million or 15% due to the decrease in headcount David mentioned earlier.

In addition, related severance costs declined by $26 million from the prior year quarter to approximately $12 million. Base salaries are now stabilized at just over $100 million per quarter.

Incentive compensation expense increased $116 million from the prior year’s quarter. In the fourth quarter of 2009, our cash bonus accrual was $58 million, roughly in line with the accruals in each of the first three quarters of the year.

However, you’ll recall that, in the fourth quarter of 2008, our bonus accrual was essentially zero due to lower than expected full year profitability resulted from severe second half capital market declines. I’ll discuss the $58 million increase in deferred compensation expense on the next slide.

On this slide, let me just note the commission expense decline by 15% versus the fourth quarter of 2008, the result of lower sales and fee revenues. Moving to the next slide, we show a slide that we’ve included in this package now for the last couple of quarters, which is basically a six-quarter net profit and loss trends for compensation expense.

Note that amortization expense for the fourth quarter of 2008, which includes the impact of accelerated amortization due to the retirement of our former CEO, was reduced significantly by the impact of current and prior quarter mark-to-market losses on related investments. Conversely, mark-to-market investment gains in the current year quarter were modest and only marginally impacted amortization expense for that period.

Note also that the percentage of current quarter investment gains and losses amortized to expense immediately has remained at roughly 40% although slightly higher in the fourth quarter of 2009, due to rounding. The next slide shows comparative financial results for AllianceBernstein Holding, the publicly traded partnership for fourth quarter and full year 2008 and 2009.

We reported diluted net income per unit for the current quarter for Alliance Holding of $0.62, an increase of 130% from the prior year quarter. Fourth quarter distribution is also $0.62 per unit, an increase of 114%.

That increase is higher than the 108% increase in net income at the operating partnership due to a decrease in the effective tax rate. Recall the taxes paid by the publicly traded partnership are generally based on its proportionate share of the operating parnership’s fee revenues.

Income tax expense was the same for both quarters, since as shown back on slide 15, fee revenues were only modestly higher in the fourth quarter of 2009 as compared to the prior year quarter. That concludes our financial review.

And now we’re ready to take your questions.

Good evening, everyone. Just a discussion on the expense outlook on a go-forward basis.

Just sort of curious, it seems like that, with. David, your comments, the headcount is sort of stabilizing some initiatives in Private Client, et cetera.

Should we be thinking just conceptually that margin improvement from this stage forward would be more a function of top-line improvement? Or are there other things you could do?

And so I'm wondering within that, maybe an update on the commercial real estate disposition.

Bill, you’re quite right. Margin improvement from this point forward will be driven from the top-line.

The expense side was ’09 story. The top line will have to be in the story going forward.

Okay. And then the second question is, just in terms of the institutional pipeline, just sort of curious – I know you mentioned it’s ticked up a little bit, but still relatively nominal in the scheme of things.

Where are you seeing the puts and takes? If you will, where is the strength?

And then secondarily, where the weakness is?

I think it’s much of the picture we have described over past quarters. We are seeing interest coming out of the Middle East, interest coming out of Asian markets.

UK continues to be somewhat depressed. And the United States of America, patchy story.

Okay. Thank you.

I’m sorry. To clarify, that’s for Institutions.

Right.

Retail, every country administrator is moving in the right direction.

Okay, thank you.

Great, thanks. Can we just talk about institutional for a second in terms of where you are on the consultant’s watch-list?

So you’re still getting put on watch lists. Where does that stand?

Thanks.

It’s a very difficult question to generalize, because the consultants obviously aren’t homogeneous, either worldwide or even in one country. And so we have continued advocacy for some of our services to some consultants worldwide.

I think we had very long and very deep relationships and they have been supporters of this firm for a decade. And there are other consultants who behave and react in a way often consultants are characterized by.

Yes. Marc, let me just add to David’s comments.

One of the things the consultants were quite focused on was voluntary turnover. And we’ve seen in the last year plus, the voluntary turnover actually declined from levels of ’07 and ’08.

In fact, the levels in ’09 were 30% lower than ’08. And we’ve had quite a bit of stability – and that’s investment professionals by the way.

We’ve had quite a bit of stability in the investing teams. And so I think that’s a big positive momentum shift for the consultants as they continue to look at ’09 outperformance, the historical outperformance of the company, and the stability of the investment teams.

That isn’t to say that – because we’ve said this before that we’ll never have here another investment person leave because, of course that’s going to happen, we have a big organization. But if you look at it on a percentage basis and even if we apply that to the levels of seniority up and down the organization, we actually are trending in a substantially better direction than we were in ’07 and in ’08.

And Marc, if I could just come back to my earlier answer, I’m thinking about particular a consultant’s illustrated difficulty of generalizing. One consultant, I know well, put us on the watch list for equities and then put us on the buy list for fixed income.

So very, very hard for us to say where we are with our consultants. What I would tell you is we continue to have a very deep dialog with all consultants.

Okay, great. And then just – I know January AUM is out, so maybe you could talk a little bit about the flow turns that we saw – that we’re seeing in the month of January, particularly on the institutional side.

I think it’s no different story to what I said earlier about Q4 and Q3. No change in pattern.

And as Peter sort of alluded to and then I went into slightly greater detail, if you actually look to the redemption picture, stripping out that one $5 billion cash flow, ’04 and ’03 sort of level-pegged each other.

Okay, great. Thanks.

Hi, good afternoon. Just a follow-up on the flows, I’m just wondering given the really strong fixed income performance in the last year and the strong flows industry-wide, if you can give any color on why you think the fixed income flows haven’t picked up more.

It looks like they have been positive the last two quarters but not accelerating. And then also when you look inside, the pipeline you have, is it concentrated in any particular area?

I think, Cynthia, we were a bit victims of our own success. So in the ’04, ’05, ’06, ’07 time period when the equity allocations to this firm were growing quite rapidly and fixed income was a solid contributor to performance, both the client relations personnel and the clients themselves thought of us and thought about equities.

And so when ’09 occurred – ’08 difficult performance, ’09, really positive performance, there needed to be an educational process, both with client facing personnel and clients themselves, and for that matter, consultants, really starting to think deeply about where is AllianceBernstein in the spectrum of fixed income managers. Now, this is a, as you know, longer game.

And we think we’ve got a substantial amount of momentum in the fixed income world. And yes, I agree that it would be nice if we had the visibility today in 2007, we would have had more flow in 2009 and in late 2008, because the world is clearly shifted in that direction.

But there is plenty of fixed income market out there. We are essentially [ph] a few hundred billion dollar shop.

There is plenty of market share for us to grab. And I think the fact that flows have slowed down, they are still net positive in the fixed income state.

And investors are still comfortable in lower risk portfolios than higher risk portfolios.

Okay, great. And I think in the last call you gave guidance on base salaries, and I’m wondering if that guidance still holds.

And on the incentive comp, how should we think about that if markets improve and the top-line grows? How variable is that, say, with advisory revenues?

I’ll let Bob comment on the salaries. But on incentive compensation, we will pay our people pretty much in line with the way revenues grow.

I mean, that’s a total comment. Obviously the allocation of compensation to individuals is different than that.

But we are looking to pay our people who we think are the best, the best.

In my earlier remark, Cynthia, I mentioned that we are sort of stabilized now at a run rate of just over $100 million per quarter for base salaries.

Great. Thanks a lot.

Thanks. Good afternoon.

I’m just curious – I think, Peter, in the past, you’ve – I think maybe it was you, but that characterized in the institutional channel the outflows kind of being – kind of LIFO, kind of the most recent clients have been kind of the first to leave in many cases. Is it possible to kind of update us on the characterization?

Is that kind of still the case? Is it really kind of the people who are newer to the organization who are leaving, or are you starting to see more longer-term clients on the equity side of the business also redeem?

Rob, I know that that question has been asked in the past. I think we’ve sort of (inaudible) avoided being specific about that because I actually don't think that we do a detailed study of it.

And we don’t really have a precise answer. I think that there is no doubt that the assets grew rapidly in the latter part of ’05, ’06, and ’07.

And clearly, those clients had weaker experience with us than clients that were with us for longer periods of time. And so that certainly could have a bigger impact on how people think about retaining us as an advisor – as a manager over time.

Having said that, I don’t – I think that that probably doesn’t give you the story on what’s actually going on in institutional redemption.

Maybe if I add color and sort of illustrate the difficulty of answering that question, let’s take a market like the United Kingdom, which was certainly one of our fastest growing markets and have seen significant redemptions on the institutional side. It’s very hard to say, is that because it was the most recent (inaudible) or is it because of the role of the consultants or is it because the UK more than any other market anywhere in the world is closing down its defined benefit schemes and therefore moving to liability-driven investment solutions in fixed income, or is it a bit of all of those things?

That’s the difficulty of answering that question.

Yes.

And just to add more to that point is a great example was – and how much of that is also plans taking lower risk having nothing to do with performance. As we all know that the risk trade is going in the opposite direction.

That, of course, will change at some point. And there will be – it will enter into our benefit.

And it refers back to the point that Cynthia made of, well, you could have benefited from that if the fixed income sort of brand awareness was more pervasive, but that’s something we are building.

Okay. And then – thanks.

Maybe just a quick modeling follow-up question. As you shifted deferred comp I guess more towards restricted stock and away from I guess reinvesting in mutual funds or other alliance products, from a share count perspective, it’s been creeping up.

Should we expect that it’s going to kind of continue to kind of creep up at the rate it’s been, or should we expect to maybe going to try to use some cash flow to kind of repurchase units and kind of keep it relatively stable? Just kind of curious what the general goal would be there.

Good question. We’ve certainly considered that.

And we will, in the matter of course, use some of our financial resources to repurchase shares over time. And don’t forget that for each share issued to an employee, that one-half of those shares is basically retained for access and effectively since the government doesn’t take shares and replace it with holding taxes, we have to pay them cash like everybody else.

We are actually retiring that half share.

Okay, great. Thank you.

Couple follow-ups. Just curious of your thoughts, Peter, particularly on M&A.

I guess there has been – one of your larger competitors make a big bet on passive and one of the smaller franchises make a reasonable sizeable bet on private equity in the last couple days. I’m just really curious if you could talk a little bit about how you sort of see yourself in the industry.

Is what you have good enough or are you kind of playing any way to sort of externally expand the platform?

Bill, thanks for asking that question because I love answering that M&A question.

(inaudible) for you.

Okay, thank you. Look, I continue to believe and we continue to believe that there may be will opportunities in the M&A market, but they are going to be places where we either don’t have a service or where we have a substantial consolidation opportunity.

And that size is generally an inhibitor to doing a deal, because culturally it’s very hard to merge large organizations. That isn’t to say others won’t try it or do it or be successful at it, but I think we have a very strong and integrated culture and to acquire something that would effectively require us to merge into that culture is challenging.

So look for us to be opportunistic where we think we can be because that can happen for sure. But it’s going to be characterized by either places where we are not or financially attractive transactions that add scale.

Okay. That’s helpful.

And then just couple of technical follow-ups. In the fixed income this quarter, how much was that – excuse me, of that was related to the PPIP initiative?

And then I asked you earlier, but you didn’t get to answer it. On the commercial real estate opportunity around the world, so where do you stand in terms of potentially downsizing some of that, which might add a little opportunity on G&A I guess?

Yes, you did ask that question, and no, we didn’t answer it because we moved on to something else. That is the commercial real estate.

So – PPIP, I think, was $1.64 billion if I remember the number properly. And I think that was raised in between the third quarter and the fourth quarter.

So I don’t know exactly where it splits out. So that’s answer to question number one.

Answer to question number two is, yes, we have some space. We’ve continually reviewed those opportunities, and we will continue to do that.

And we will make economically rational decisions with regard to this phase.

Sorry, the fourth quarter?

All three were fourth quarter; one October and two in December.

Perfect. Thanks so much for taking all my questions.

Great. Thank you, Stephanie.

And thanks, everyone, for attending the call. If you have any further questions, feel free to call the Investor Relations team at any time.

And with that, enjoy the rest of your evening.