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00:00A lot of focus out there right now on lending on consumer borrowing to be specific here. How did it hold up over at Wells Fargo. That was great. Great to see you all again. Thanks for having us. You know we did see in the quarter continued progress in the recovery. And I think you saw that through the loan growth that we saw. You know it was really across the board also on the consumer side as well as the commercial side. You know on the consumer side we saw growth in auto cards in it underneath. We saw some growth in our nonconforming mortgage portfolio as well. And so we finally started to see some of that growth materialize which I think would be a good thing. Yeah. Mike I just want one quick follow here on the auto loans. Can you kind of give us a little bit more perspective there. Because I did see that. If I'm reading the data correctly that a lot of it was higher value of the loans themselves. Was the volume in loans also higher. Yeah. We had a record origination quarter again third quarter in a row and in the auto business. Now about two thirds of our auto business is used cars. So we are benefiting from higher used car prices. We're also seeing that volume be really strong there as well. Use the new car markets a little more constrained but we're seeing that growth really come through and the used in use car buying which is which is good given the mix for business. You know on one hand you have inflation which could impact consumer spending and on the other hand you have higher interest rates. And I'm wondering how much those higher interest rates could potentially stifle some of this loan growth and deter some of the consumers from taking on more loans. Well I think you have to first start with the fact that we're talking about raising rates means that we're having we have a really strong economy underneath it. And you see that you know in spending consumer spending you see that in some of the equity markets. See that in you know loan growth as we sort of talked about. And coupled with that consumers still have a lot of liquidity. You know it may be off the peaks that we saw you know a couple of quarters ago but still on average maybe 30 percent more in consumer deposit accounts. So that really should help consumers continue to be out there growing the economy. Now rates again will be helpful for us. We've talked about that in terms of our net interest income. But I think it's a good sign that the economy continues to be pretty strong underneath that which is which should be good. As we look to the rest of the year you know beyond the consumer business you did show some strides in your investment banking business. I'm really curious Mike about specific plans to potentially grow that business more into this year and how competitive you think you could be. Yeah well look we we have. We think we have a lot of opportunity in the investment banking business in particular as you sort of think about going after the opportunity to work with our middle market and commercial banking clients where we have a really great market share. We've talked about that opportunity for the last few quarters so we think there's a lot of room for us to continue to grow. We're adding people both in the commercial bank in and in the investment bank. And that's you know that's in the context of us continuing to execute on our efficiency initiatives and agenda while we're store able to get costs down. We're able to make those investments to go after that opportunity which we think will be significant over time.

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Wells Fargo CFO Says Economy Is 'Pretty Strong'

Wells Fargo Chief Financial Officer Mike Santomassimo talks about the bank's earnings. He says “Consumers still have a lot of liquidity,” which is a sign “the economy continues to be pretty strong." (Source: Bloomberg)

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