Dominic Ng: I think how high is too high based on — again, the macroeconomic environment. The way I see it is that there’s — we do a lot of these volatility comparison that is that, well, if we obvious many banks out there buying stock because they can generate the kind of EPS or return that is required, and that’s what they need to — what we need to do. We obviously today, with a very high capital ratio, we still have industry-leading ROE. So therefore, this is obviously not something that we have to urgently do for our shareholders in light of, we also have dividend increase year after year, right? So from that standpoint, but we are shareholders friendly. So we think that we come to a point, it is capital ratio getting too high.
There is really not much risk in the horizon in the market, in terms of — in the economic outlook. And then we — for very reason feel that there’s so much earnings, it’s just not going to be possible for enough growth, we absolutely would consider that buyback scenario. We’ve done that. We’ve done that before, and we will do it again. But in this kind of uncertain economic environment, we don’t know whether there will be a recession coming or how aggressive the Fed wants to keep the rate high for how long that may cause a major downward spiral on the economic conditions that affect certain industries and so forth. This may create a much better opportunity for potential acquisitions or anything that is available out in the market, and we don’t want to spend the money on buyback and not having excess capital to strike for much better opportunity.
Because after all, we don’t run our bank as a quarter-to-quarter kind of basis, we run our bank on the long-term sustainable basis. For the last three quarters, I’ve been here, we always look at year after year of record earnings and year after you are sustainable growth, and we want to be able to do that. And so if you do that, we constantly have to make investment. And just like even in a challenging deposit environment like the last quarter, we’re still investing in our infrastructure. We’re still investing in our enterprise risk management platform to make sure that we continue to have the ability to sustain the long-term growth like the way we have done for the past decade. So, very simple, actually, a very simple kind of strategy and it’s just like on the makeup.
If it makes sense, we’ll do it the right way.
Jared Shaw: Okay. And I guess just one follow-up looking at the single-family residential, great growth there. What are some of the dynamics driving that? Are you still seeing strong integration coming in? Is it additional capital coming into the country? Or is this just the existing customer base and maybe the existing potential customer base is already in the U.S. anymore?
Dominic Ng: It’s a combination. There’s always immigrants coming to U.S. The fact is we, which has become bigger and our brand stronger, our branch networks all over the place and then people recognize the brand. And so more and more of the customer in the Asian-American community that from our retail banking footprint coming to East West Bank because they know that they can get East West to make the decision to approve credit in a timely manner. We’ll close the loans, also fund the loans on a timing manner and both from services and that are broad outreach within the branch footprint allow us to continue to have a very strong momentum so far. Again, this also surprised me a little bit. I would expect that with the rate rising like that, people are not buying homes but I guess people are still buying homes.
