Danny_Black, I would disagree…

* Banks are opaque to the common investor. The numbers that really matter for their financial health are deeply subjective and frequently mis-represented by management. Other businesses are driven by a combination of revenues and profitability, both of which are pretty straightforward to assess.

* Banks are highly leveraged. Always makes a business trickier to analyze, since errors in estimation are magnified.

* Banks are significantly impacted by regulatory policy, more so than most businesses. Again, hard to determine what the Fed will decide to do to your investment.

While GE includes a pretty large bank, it at least has significant other operations that are easier to figure out.

Are banks hard to analyse? Yes because they are large complicated multinationals. Are they harder than say GE or Oracle? No.

fresnodan, dimwit. The people who have a fiduciary responsibilities are the whinny investment advisors who are currently suing banks because they piled into a bubble at the top of the market.

PS by “kicking homeowners out” you mean seizing collateral on contractual obligation that the counterparty has long defaulted on? I know Mr Salmon has an issue with people demanding they meet their contractual obligations but i was not aware this was a Reuters editorial line.

http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/4279-N -Emerson-Ave-Fresno-CA-93705/18719296_zp id/#{scid=hdp-site-map-list-address}

were worth 200K, and are now “worth” 80K (and still sinking like a stone).

Borrowing is not income
Debt is not wealth