I have Mark Grier here with us today. He is the Vice Chairman of Prudential, and he oversees finance, risk management, investor relations, global business and technology solutions, auditing, external affairs, global marketing, communications. It's a pretty broad role that Mark handles. He actually joined Pru back in 1995 as CFO until taking the Vice Chairman role in 2002. Before that, he was Executive Vice President and co-head of Chase Global Markets. I have to say that it's always great to hear what Mark has to say, just given his broad knowledge on a wide variety of Prudential's issues as well as the industry, and his insights are always valuable. Mark, thanks so much for coming, and we look forward to hearing your presentation.
Thanks, Andrew. Good morning. I'm going to try to leave time for questions, think about anything that you would like to have me address at the end. Excuse me. I want to start off with a few points of context. As most of you probably know, or all of you know, we're coming off what we would euphemistically describe as kind of a choppy week. We announced earnings last week, and we fell short of expectations on Wall Street, and the stock price behavior was pretty adverse on Thursday and Friday of last week. Let me just make a couple of points about this. We're certainly realistic about the context of quarterly earnings and expectations, and this was, by the classical definition, a miss.
We had a tough quarter in our Group Life business, including group life insurance itself as well as group disability, and that drove a variance to the expectations in the market relative to what we had talked about doing this year and the context of what we had done in prior quarters. There was some pain associated with that. In that environment, when the miss happens, there's a trading world and there's a fundamental world, we can't go through the things that we know about the company and reconcile the magnitude of the change in the stock price with the fundamental events that are happening in terms of earnings in all of our businesses, but also in the context of the miss related primarily to group life insurance. It seems that the price move was way out of proportion to the economics of the quarter.
There are explanations that run through things like it creates questions about what's going to happen next quarter and the quarter after, because there is serial correlation in earnings. Whether or not there are broader things that everybody ought to rethink about Prudential and where it's headed and our ability to achieve our longer-term objectives. Our view, which we expressed on the call, is that the fundamentals of the company remain very strong. The business drivers that we're most heavily focused on continue to perform extremely well. Our interpretation of the group life loss and the adverse mortality outcome in the quarter is that it's an isolated event. We went from a quarter in which we had our most favorable benefit ratio to the quarter in which we had our least favorable benefit ratio, as far as we've been keeping these books.
If you look at a rolling four-quarter average and think about the center of gravity of this, it doesn't look anything like the fourth quarter to first quarter variance. The answer to the question about what really happened there is a quantitative question, and that answer will emerge as we see whether or not we return to more normal levels of mortality and benefit ratios as we move through the rest of the year. As we said on the call, we didn't find anything in examining the adverse outcome in group life insurance that would suggest that that's a chronic problem. Differentiating, though, by the way, from group disability, where we have had a few bad quarters now and where we are focused on repricing and managing claims to try to get that business back on track. That one is off track.
Keep in mind that collectively, these businesses amount to only about 5% of Prudential's total earnings. We come into this with a context that's probably at least a little bit defensive around the way our businesses are performing and our view of the fundamentals and the direction of the company, in contrast to the earnings report and the stock market outcome last week. The second point of context is that although we like to try to talk about it in the past tense, we're still really in a crisis environment in a lot of ways. The interest rate environment, the foreign exchange environment, the turbulence in Europe all continue to affect markets.
The challenges that we have to manage in what is a short term, meaning probably a couple of years, short term environment of low rates and flat yield curves that will turn into, at least if the Fed's vision comes true here, turn into a return to a more normal level of interest rates and a more normal shape to the yield curve. Being ready for that kind of an environment and making sure that we're positioned to benefit from the opportunities that we'll have from a return to normal. At the same time, we're wrestling with the volatility and the uncertainty and the background music that goes along with what's happening in Europe and the crisis there. Presents challenges. You see that volatility in our balance sheet. You see that in some of our mark-to-market entries.
You saw it in a reported net income loss, which was, by the way, primarily driven by accounting geography, an FX-related revaluation in liabilities that went through the income statement and offsetting revaluation on the asset side that didn't. Even though the economics were netted, the accounting was not. There was another compounding factor there. I just want to call your attention to the fact that we can't look out the window every day and assume that it's always going to be like this. This crisis will pass, and we will have a return to a more normal interest rate environment at some point. Different members of the Fed have different views on when that may be.
We have a challenge to manage the context of today versus the context of, at some point, a return to normal in a healthier financial market environment, particularly as it relates to the level of interest rates and the shape of the yield curve. My final point of context is to reiterate something that John Strangfeld said on the call, which is that we've been focused on an ROE outcome in 2013 of a 13%-14% range, and we remain as committed as ever to realizing that objective. We don't see that things happened in the first quarter that have derailed us from the possibility of achieving that. Things have to go right. I think John said on the call, we never said it was going to be easy, but we believe that that's out there for us.
The elements that will drive us to that outcome, the benefits that we're ultimately going to see in the Star and Edison acquisitions, the continued growth in the rest of our international operations and annuities and asset management where we produce very high returns. The opportunities that we have to deploy capital, either through share repurchases and dividends, returning capital to shareholders or in our businesses, are the three core ingredients of the ROE accretion that we anticipate over the next couple of years, and the basic elements of that story remain in place. It won't be a straight line, and again, it won't be easy, but the things that are going to happen to put us in a position where we have a genuinely differentiated return on equity, I think are still in place for us.
When I say genuinely differentiated, our competitors talk about aspirations in the nine, 10, maybe on a good day, 11% range for ROE, and we believe that the earnings power of Prudential, properly capitalized, is substantially above that. We believe that we have the opportunity to prove that by realizing an ROE outcome that's going to be a couple of percentage points higher than what you're going to see out of the companies that you would probably compare us to and think of as our competitors. The stake in the ground that we have put in place around the ROE aspiration, and again, linked to our sense of the earnings power of our company, remains in place and is not impacted by the noise in the first quarter. As I said, we had a pretty choppy week last week. We've got a rainy morning.
We've got futures down. It's kind of hard to cast everything in its most favorable light. I don't want to understate the challenges, but we believe that the fundamentals of the company are on track to deliver what we've promised to the market and what we fully anticipate we will deliver as we get through the next few quarters. Having said that, we can spend the rest of the time reading this fine print that's been produced by the lawyers, and it gets longer every time. I'm going to move kind of quickly through the slides because as I said, I do want to leave some time for questions. This is a presentation that has a lot of consistent themes in it. If you followed Prudential, you will have heard much of this before.
Let me just highlight a couple of aspects of both businesses and the corporate environment. On this page, I think maybe the headline is the fourth bullet, which is the transformation of the company to what we think of now as a real distribution powerhouse. We grew up in a world of proprietary distribution and a heavy emphasis on product.
While we remain at the cutting edge in all of our markets with respect to the products that we sell and the way in which we sell them, if you look more broadly at Prudential now, the growth and success that we've had in bank channels and in wire house channels and in independent channels, in addition to the quality of our proprietary distribution, I think are all part of a very important transformation over the past 10 years to a company that has different opportunities now than we would have had 10 years ago because of the way in which we can react to changes in the market and the way in which now we can make sure we're getting our products into the market, the way in which clients want to buy those products. This is a phenomenon that has happened across the company.
An extraordinary result in Japan, which I'll come to, similarly in the U.S., where our annuity business, for example, is now distributing through a more balanced mix of channels that provides us with less volatility and I hope at the end of the day, better profit opportunities because of our ability to mix and match products and channels. Just an update of the reminder slide on business mix. This is attributed equity. It shows the attractive mix that we've talked about now for a long time. 42% of our equity is attributed to the international insurance businesses, primarily in Japan, but also very successful business in Korea and some emerging success in some other countries. That's a nice anchor.
This is business that's not sensitive to U.S. equity markets, generally not very sensitive to capital market conditions anywhere, where profits are driven primarily by mortality and expense margins as opposed to investment margins. That's a good anchor in terms of the kind of turbulence that we see in the markets. The nice overlay on this one is that it's also growing handsomely and producing good returns. There's a nice package bundled in that international insurance slice. Then moving around the pie, the businesses become more market sensitive. I'm going to come back to some of the risk issues in individual annuities, but we wind up in the top left corner there with about 24% of our equity invested in the individual annuity business, which is portrayed here as the most market sensitive of the businesses that we're in.
The first 60% or so of the pie is primarily mortality driven. The risk content of that business and the drivers of profitability are not capital market sensitive, or at least not as capital market sensitive as some of the other things we do. As you move from individual life up, the businesses become somewhat more market sensitive. Although in retirement, it's primarily spread sensitivity as opposed to equity market sensitivity. This slide is a portrayal of some of the philosophical elements of our thoughts on capital. There are really two driving themes here. One is that for us, risk management starts with the deployment of capital. I'm saying it that way to differentiate from the after the fact attribution or allocation of capital. It's the deployment, meaning the real investment in building a business that's going to have distribution and product and risk.
Thinking about the intrinsic risks in the businesses that we decide to be in, because once we decide to do what we're doing in Japan, we're going to have JPY risk. No matter how many models we run after the fact, it's the business decision and the construction of the business model that really drives the ultimate volatility and the ultimate risk profile of the company. The first message is that for us, risk management and capital management are linked, but not linked after the fact analytically. Linked before the fact when we think about the deployment of capital into the businesses that we're in. The second headline here is a reminder that we're playing both defense and offense.
We characterized it more explicitly during the crisis and talked a lot about the strength of the company and the fact that we felt like we were in a unique position to weather the storm, but also to gain an advantage, and we proved that with the acquisition of Star and Edison from AIG. We haven't lost sight of the fact that this is still out there for us. The world is still uncertain, risky, and volatile. We need to make sure that we keep our eye on the third bullet on the right-hand side there, which is the unquestioned financial strength, which helps us in our markets, but also gives us the flexibility to respond to opportunities. We continue to anticipate that we're going to have very attractive opportunities to deploy capital at some point before too long this year.
As we look at what's going on out in the market and the capital strength and the product skills that we have, we're optimistic about what we will be able to accomplish this year in terms of capital deployment. This is a restatement of the story I just told about capital. I'm not going to go through it again. This is my famous bubble chart. This is a view of the company that if you had to only have one picture in front of you, this is probably what you would like to have in front of you. On the horizontal axis, we're plotting ROE prospects. By the way, this is a stylized view. Don't get out your compasses and rulers and protractors and try to figure out exactly what it's telling you. It's a stylized view of the company.
Across the right, ROE prospects with the highest ROEs all the way to the right. Going vertically, it's the growth potential of the business. The size of the bubble is the size of the business for us, the capital that we have invested. The color of the bubble is a rough index of volatility, where green would be less volatile than the market, if you need a way to think about it. Blue would be just about as volatile as the market, and red would be levered to the market, more volatile than the market. In a perfect world, you might love to have all green bubbles, big and on the top right. You see that we've got at least a little bit of that perfect world here.
The international insurance business provides very attractive returns, provides good growth opportunities, is big for us, and is also low volatility. We continue to characterize group insurance here as medium volatility. Whether or not we change our view of that as we come out of the first quarter, as I said earlier, is a quantitative question, and we'll see what happens with the mortality picture there. In terms of its earnings power and the way we think about fit in our portfolio of businesses, we would still rank group insurance as a medium volatility business. The businesses that are towards the lower left here actually produce stable earnings, and in the case of individual life, significantly higher returns than we've pictured here. That business has kind of consistently beat its intrinsic earnings power as far as we view it strategically.
There's some things about the businesses on the lower left in terms of both volatility, cash flow characteristics that still make them attractive for us as part of the overall portfolio. I think this presents a sense of the opportunities that we have if we execute well, and as I mentioned in the themes around ROE opportunities, that the opportunities to grow in asset management, international, and individual annuities are opportunities to grow at attractive returns. Part of this ROE story is the notion that there's more and more weight in our capital picture attached to the businesses that produce better returns because they're the ones that also grow more rapidly. That's a nice dynamic to have. This is the advertisement for the league tables. Just one point on this one, which is that in the defined contribution business, you see that we're seventh.
We talk about retirement a lot. I think we were early to get into understanding retirement needs and building business systems that try to meet those needs on the part of our clients. We don't aspire to be number one or number two or number three in defined benefit. The real big players there are much more technology driven and much more commodity type competitors than we want to be. We're trying to be in a higher value added part of the business chain there. It's challenging, and we've mentioned it in several investor day presentations as well as quarterly earnings calls. I just want to point out that we don't necessarily aspire to be number one in every box here, and we think we're pretty well positioned relative to where we'd like to be across the league tables. Let me make a few comments on international.
As you saw, it's about 42% of our attributed capital. It's also pretty close to 50% of our earnings now. Just a couple of key themes. We want to be big and important in a fairly small number of countries. We don't aspire to be a 16th of an inch thin around the whole world. There are many things about our businesses that are not scalable cross border. We want to be in places where we can build scale and benefit from that, and also not have the risks that go along with being so fragmented and spread out around the world. The third bullet highlights needs-based selling, and that in one dimension kind of comes across as an advertising tagline.
One of the most important drivers of the returns that we earn in international insurance is the quality of our sales, which is reflected quantitatively in high persistency. The persistency metrics that we print in our international businesses are substantially better than the local persistency metrics printed by our competitors. That business staying on the books longer has a big positive impact on the intrinsic growth, which means the way in which the book grows over time, whether we're selling or not, but also on profitability and returns. Needs-based selling here, while it's got marketing content, actually in international for us is translated into a very tangible result as it relates to core drivers of profitability and performance.
We have fielded many questions about the attraction of Japan, particularly because we deployed about $4.5 billion of new capital in the Star and Edison acquisitions, and raised questions about, what do you guys see there? Why do you want to be in Japan? Let me hit a couple of headlines here. The first point is that it's the world's second largest life insurance market. This is a huge place to go try to sell life insurance, and that in Japan is, at the end of the day, what we're really good at. Japan's a very wealthy country, and while they face the same demographic and retirement challenges that many countries around the world face, Japan has the resources to meet those challenges.
If you look at the combination of household wealth in the second bullet, and then liquid assets, and I refer to this as the money in the mattress in Japan, there's a huge opportunity to play a role in facilitating retirement outcomes for Japanese retirees who have the means to meet their retirement needs. That $10 trillion in the mattress is kind of for us, with respect to retirement, the target. We want to get in between the client and that money with an outcome that's still low risk, conservative, understood by the customer, fits the skill sets that we have to sell, but creates a better retirement outcome than the client's going to get leaving that money in the mattress. Tapping into that retirement opportunity and that pool of liquid assets is now something that we can demonstrate we've been able to do.
Somewhere close to half of our product sales in Japan now are retirement driven. They're retirement applications of high margin products. They play to the skills and the product results that we aspire to. It's a different twist. It's a different application. It's a little bit different sales process, but we have been proving that through a couple of different channels in Japan we can tap into that pool of liquid assets and continue to grow and continue to produce attractive returns. The attraction at Japan is below the 40,000-foot view, where you would look at this and say, well, the country grows slowly, it's getting old, there are a lot of insurance companies, and all that's true.
We've positioned ourselves differently, and we're able to take advantage of the opportunity to play a role in the retirement process in tapping into the $10 trillion that the Japanese have available to support their retirement needs. That's kind of the key theme around building distribution, and building product, and being in Japan. I mentioned the attraction of the channel story when I was providing some context on the overall slide at the beginning. This shows the mix of new business premiums coming in through the LifePlanner channel, which is Prudential's historical homegrown business in Japan. The Gibraltar Life Consultants, by the way, you have previously heard us refer to them as Life Advisors. Part of what's happened as we've gone through the consolidation with Star and Edison has been a change in that name from Life Advisor to Life Consultant.
You see the bank channel in yellow and the independent agency channel on top. As I said, and I won't say it more than one more time, what's happening here is the transition to a real distribution powerhouse, where we're effectively accessing a range of channels with a range of products, but with a continued focus on the high-margin products that we're good at selling. The financial performance has been spectacular. We've grown rapidly. There's a gain of about $150 million in the first quarter of last year shown in Gibraltar that relates to our China Pacific investment. If you're thinking about the operating side of this, you need to take $150 million out of that $318 million, and then you'll see the consistent story here about very rapid growth in our international insurance business.
With respect to annuities, this slide is a portrayal of some of the turbulence in the market. The point of showing this is that we've had a lot of growth in sales, and so has MetLife. There's a tendency to think that it must reflect aggressive pricing or aggressive commissions or something else going on. This is just a reminder that there have been big companies that have entered and exited, and there's been a lot of turbulence around market share and pricing and positioning, and for us, by the way, also some channel dynamics, that have affected sales. The point is that it's a story that requires a little more thought than just thinking it's all got to be crazy behavior in the market. It's not.
There are dynamics here related to what's on this slide and some of the channel issues that have affected the amount that we sell and the amount that Met sells that have created maybe a misperception that we're not as tight as we ought to be on either pricing or risk management here. That's not the way we've thought about it. We've tried to be consistent with our pricing objectives and market objectives as we sell. The market has been moving around quite a bit around us in terms of the entry and exit that you see portrayed on this slide, and also in terms of the way some of the channels have behaved. The point is that there's more to this annuity picture than just the headline roll-up rate on the product. This is a portrayal of the channel story in annuities.
As I mentioned at the beginning, again, I'm only going to say it one more time, we're building a distribution powerhouse. The balance now across channels here is something that's pretty attractive, and we've aspired to this. We've worked at building the wirehouse channel, and we've worked at building the bank channel, and you see that those results have paid off. It takes a long time, you see that those results have paid off in an attractive picture on the right-hand side of the current mix of channels. One of the headlines over our annuity business is the way in which we have embedded risk management in our product design, as opposed to leaving everything for the account of Prudential as principal. We have what we call an auto-rebalancing feature.
This is an asset allocation algorithm that runs account by account every night and rebalances between equities and fixed income. This slide shows the mix of our products that have either the auto-rebalancing feature, shown in blue, the kind of older generation embedded derivative feature, which is shown in green, or no living benefits, which is shown in red. The main message here is how important the auto-rebalancing feature has become for us. If there's a key point about that, it's that the auto-rebalancing feature won't take the volatility out of the accounting results in a range of, say, ±20%.
It takes a lot of the tail risk out of the product, because as the equity market goes down, funds are reallocated into short-term bond funds, and we reach a point, stylized view, we reach a point where the market's down 20% and client assets are all in fixed income. We get to the point where that tail risk stops. That's a really important message about this because one of the questions we get is could this blow you up? The answer is no, it's not going to blow us up. Partly because the auto-rebalancing feature takes the tail risk out, but also partly because these are all notional guarantees, and there's not cash moving around as things are fluctuating in that accounting range of volatility.
We're comfortable with the risk we're taking here. At the end of the day, what's happening, looking through the volatility, is that we're building up a lot of assets under management, account values and individual annuities. We're building up a lot of assets under management that throw off very attractive fee streams. These are very productive assets in terms of the fees that they carry with them. Again, it's growing with a lot of loud music around it. As that core grows, we're building up a very attractive stream of fees that are tied to those underlying account balances. We look through some of this volatility. We focus on hedging economics, not so much accounting. We tolerate volatility, which always requires explanations.
The core event that's happening here is the accumulation of very attractive account values that are going to continue to throw off streams of fee income that are very high relative to things like retail mutual funds. I'm going to move kind of quickly through the rest of this. I think hitting international and the points I wanted to make on individual annuities, in addition to my introductory remarks, are the main things I wanted to touch on. In retirement, just two headlines. One is the traditional full service retirement business is under pressure. We've talked about that for a couple of years now. It's reflected in the fact that we've had some lapses and lost some accounts where we decided not to compete on price with some of the more commodity type providers in the market.
The second is the bright spot here is in the institutional side, which used to be pretty boring. It was GICs and FANFs, but now we're doing some business in defined benefit risk transfer, which is very attractive. We're doing some business in the synthetic GICs or the investment-only stable value products, which is also very attractive. Very high returns. It doesn't use a lot of capital, but it's very accretive to the capital ROE objectives that we've set. In a way, in retirement, the action has moved from the defined benefit platform and full service arena to the institutional side, where defined benefit risk transfer and investment-only stable value have become very interesting and have, for us, generated pretty meaningful amounts of business. As I said, I'm going to move kind of quickly through here. Asset management.
The key point for us here is around consistent execution. We have our things. We do those things very well. A lot has been clicking for us over the past few years in asset management. We've done extremely well in generating asset flows. We, as a company now, touch almost $950 billion of assets. Within the asset management business, you see the box on the right, about $640 billion of assets are managed by the subset of the total company that we call the asset management business. Let me just get to the net flow picture. I mentioned that a lot is clicking for us here. This is a good graphic portrayal of that. We've had tremendous success, including two years ago, positive net flows approaching $30 billion. This business has done extremely well in terms of generating assets under management.
There's some variable components of earnings that are a little bit challenging. Overall, this is a great result for us and part of that ROE accretion and business mix story that's very important. I'm going to stop with this one, and I'll be happy to take questions for a few minutes. I've left a little bit of time. I want to make sure that while you're all in here, if we have a chance to hear from somebody, you get a chance to tell me. I don't understand why you're allowed to ask questions. Go ahead.
Yeah, I cannot let you. Guys, oh, there it is.
Oh, there you go.
Okay. All right. Mark, I just want to make sure. That was a great opening with regard to the quarterly results. Maybe just quickly the operating EPS guidance for this year is $6.20-$6.60. That would imply that you need to get about $1.55-$1.65 per quarter versus what we normalized at about $1.34 in the first. I think in addition to the group, there was asset management, Corp and other, some slight benefits issues in the Japan operation. Are you still confident in that $6.20-$6.60 estimate? That's question A. Question B is the 13%-14% ROE. I was really heartened because when I lowered our estimate to a $7.78 for next year, that fell right on top of the 13% ROE. I think you mentioned improvement in existing businesses, accretion from Star and Edison, and capital deployment.
Wow, I'm going to get shot now. I think I heard something. All that stuff is intact, and you're very confident that. I think I'm going to fall down now. Maybe Mark doesn't want to hear the question. Bottom line, you said it's not going to be easy, but are you confident? One, the guidance around this year, and then two, next year, the 2013, are you confident?
Well, at the table next to Andrew is Eric Durant, who's our head of investor relations. If I answer the guidance question, Eric's going to jump up and slap his hand across my mouth and not let me say anything. I will not be confirming guidance, but maybe let me reiterate a point that we also made on the earnings call. We highlighted the shortfall in group life, and I think if you do some fairly simple arithmetic, you can kind of attribute the whole issue around the quarterly performance versus your concept of run rate and broader outcome to the difference between what group life has been doing and what it did in the quarter. Arithmetically, there's kind of a nice fit with respect to that explanation.
Let me add a point that John Strangfeld also made on our call, which is that there were a bunch of things that we don't highlight as one-time items and pick apart because we don't want to drive ourselves crazy in addition to not driving you crazy. We did have some higher expenses in a couple of businesses, initiative-driven, where we're investing in some new products and doing some things that are going to pay off down the road. We did have some lower levels of variable income, particularly in asset management, where we've got some sensitivity to commercial real estate revaluations, and maybe some tweaks in terms of some of the historically more favorable comparisons around benefit ratios.
The way John said it on the call was that we didn't think that even beyond the narrower issue in group insurance, that this quarter was fully reflective of the earnings power of the company. I would reiterate that. I think, again, we could pick apart a whole bunch of little things, but almost all the little things went the other way this quarter. We're feeling much better about the quarter than the headlines would suggest or even than the earnings results would suggest. I think you have a sense of some of the kind of items based on your question.
On the ROE target, we've got the game plan that gets there, and we know what has to happen in terms of execution across the three big drivers, the Star and Edison outcome, the performance of our higher ROE businesses, and the deployment of capital. We're not immune from market conditions, and we have to be realistic. We're just in businesses that are affected by the environment. I can't look through all that and say that no matter what happens ever anywhere, we're going to be on the same track. We won't be.
We feel confident that we've got the game plan, that as a result of everything we've been doing for years, building the businesses that we're in, we know what it's going to take to get there, and I would reiterate John's view that while we never said it would be easy, we're not compromising our view that that is a reflection of the earnings power and potential of the company that we should be able to realize. Now, thanks to your 10-minute question, we're out of time. We have one more here. Maybe I'll take two more, and then we'll have to call it quits. I think we have a breakout session coming up we can continue this.
You mentioned a focus on the retirement market in Japan, my understanding was that most of your products there were actually mortality-based. Is this a new product initiative, or are there existing products that you think are actually retirement-focused?
Much of what we're doing in retirement is an extension of our mortality-based products to retirement needs. We're selling products that have asset accumulation features or retirement income features, but also significant mortality content. The reason for that is that the mortality margins in Japan are extremely attractive. The answer is it's an extension of the business model that focuses on the high margin opportunities in mortality, but retirement applications of the way in which we can design products to either build assets or build retirement income. I promise one more question here, I think we're going to get thrown out of the room.
With Gibraltar being a big lever to get to your target ROE for the next year, on the cost save side, what type of visibility do you have into the cost saves? Is there a level of top-line growth that you need to get to the ROE range in Gibraltar?
The answer on cost saves is that we've got a lot of visibility. We've quoted that number in terms of what we've been spending and what we've been saving, and we'll continue to track that report card as we go through the year. The original aspiration was to save $250 million in run rate expenses and to spend about $500 million to get there. We just reiterated recently on the call that we anticipate that that's still very much on track. There's a lot of visibility, and we report on that in every quarterly call. With respect to top-line growth, we're not so focused on top-line growth, primarily because lots of product mix issues affect top line that don't affect ROE the same way.
We're a lot more focused on the returns that we earn when we deploy capital because the accounting for products changes that top-line outcome in ways that may or may not be driving the thing that we're really aspiring to, which is the ROE. I think we're going to have to stop here. We're already into the next presentation, which isn't me. Thank you.