After all the efforts at regulation of the financial industry since the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc, the stock investors' faith in the US financial industry has not improved since 2008, compared to the rest of the market. According to data valuations collated by Bloomberg, this industry is only 13.2 times profits, which is the lowest amongst ten other American industries.
The tightened regulations and reduced risks have not yet been able to restore the confidence that bank revenues and profits would be worth paying for by investors. This is the current climate despite projected earnings that financial firms would expand three times greater than the S&P 500 for 2013.
In a phone interview, Pioneer Investment Management Inc fund manager John Carey said, "The crisis is certainly something that still troubles investors. It's 2013 and we're talking about things that happened in the middle of the 2000s. As investors, we're still a bit concerned about the fallout from all of that, which hasn't been completely put to rest."
In 2008, bank stocks were the most heavily devastated as the credit crisis occured, with the S&P 500 Financials Index dropped by 83%, a decline which included a 23% drop in October 2008 and 27% in January 2009 according to Bloomberg data.
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