Global Markets & Investment Banking Last year, we filled the last major strategic gap in our debt markets business with the acquisition of the Entergy-Koch trading platform, now Merrill Lynch Global Commodities Services. This business is one of the top three in its field, trading natural gas, power and weather derivatives. It is a state-of-the-art platform on which we can build, and will be an engine for growth in the years ahead. We also continued to grow our principal investing activities and increased our expertise in trading and securitizing mortgages and other asset-backed instruments. We enhanced our sales and municipal bond origination capabilities and invested in new talent for foreign exchange. In the equities business, we continued the evolution of our trading franchise to better meet the changing needs of our clients and offer broader electronic order execution capabilities. We made significant investments in technology and new talent to help lead this effort. We now have the platform to capture a bigger share of the prime brokerage business over time. And we met our hiring goal in investment banking, filling critical slots with 34 new senior bankers in targeted industries and geographies.

Wealth Management Global Private Client is the best business of its kind in the industry. In 2004, we realized the benefits of our three-pronged strategy of revenue diversification, asset annuitization and client segmentation, as the business showed remarkable consistency through rapidly changing market conditions. The net result was a year in which GPC's pretax earnings were the highest in Merrill Lynch history. We accelerated our performance in this business by being significantly ahead of our industry peers in growing our force of financial advisors and meeting our five percent hiring target for the year. We have the most FAs and they are the most productive by every measure: assets per FA, revenue per FA and pretax earnings per FA.

Merrill Lynch Investment Managers posted strong financial results. We made gains in investment management in the U.S. and good progress in Europe with solid revenue and pretax earnings growth. This financial performance is driven by continued outstanding investment performance. More than 70% of our assets under management are above benchmark or median for one, three, and five years, and 35 MLIM funds received Morningstar'sTM highest four- or five-star ratings.

Taking Charge of Our Future We maintained a good track record of defending ourselves against unfair allegations in some high-profile cases and also in the vast majority of arbitrations. But we remain mindful that we have a responsibility to uphold our reputation. We have always been a leader in investor protection, building the Merrill Lynch franchise based on decades of client trust. It is the foundation of our relationships, which we continue to strengthen by focusing on discipline, risk management and thoughtful decision making.

At Merrill Lynch, we are taking the steps needed to continue evolving our culture. In senior management, we enjoyed a year of continuity and gained experience working together as a team. I believe the leadership of our organization is as strong as it has ever been. Now, we are focusing on developing the next generation of leaders.

Ultimately, the culture defines the organization and the leaders define the culture. Therefore, we have to define the leaders. Last year, we engaged in a process of identifying the specific traits necessary for leadership at Merrill Lynch and took steps to help make executives more aware of how they stack up against that model and what actions they can take to continue to progress and grow. Using a common language and consistent evaluative model, we can ensure that the culture we create reflects the values that are most important for success.