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The Price To Book League Table Revisited

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by Felix Salmon
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Mar 18 2008 12:00am EDT

The Price-to-Book League Table, Revisited

In today's earnings report, Lehman Brothers reported that its book value rose one cent to $39.45 per share. The stock is doing great this morning, up $6 or so to $37.80, which puts Lehman on a price-to-book ratio of 0.96. Now that Yahoo Quotes has been updated, let's update that league table:

Bank Price/Book, March 13 Price/Book, March 18
Countrywide 0.19 0.16
Bear Stearns 0.73 0.06
Wachovia 0.74 0.67
Citigroup 0.93 0.82
JP Morgan Chase 1.06 1.10
Lehman Brothers 1.12 0.96
Bank of America 1.15 1.12
Morgan Stanley 1.44 1.27
Merrill Lynch 1.53 1.40
Goldman Sachs 1.60 1.49

Everyone's down, with the exception of JP Morgan, and now that the panic of the weekend seems to be subsiding, there's quite a lot of upside just to get back to the levels of last week. The buy here would probably be Lehman, but for suspicions that it still hasn't taken the writedown medicine which devastated the balance sheets of most of the other banks on the list. In any case, the number of banks trading below book value has increased by one since last week, even with today's spike in Lehman shares.

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