From Google Finance at http://finance.google.com we obtain the following market capitalization numbers for the “Big Five” Canadian banks and the five biggest U.S. banks in terms of market capitalization from their closing numbers on the New York Stock Exchange on Friday, February 20, 2009: (B represents billions of U.S. dollars)
“Big Five” Canadian banks:
1) Royal Bank of Canada (RY) 29.04B
2) Toronto-Dominion Bank (TD) $21.57B
3) The Bank of Nova Scotia (BNS) $19.84B
4) Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CM) $12.18B
5) Bank of Montreal (BMO) $10.77B
total = $93.40B
Five biggest U.S. banks:
1) JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) $74.28B
2) Wells Fargo & Company (WFC) $46.13B
3) Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. (GS) $39.06B
4) Bank of America Corporation (BAC) $24.23B
5) Citigroup Inc. (C) $10.63B
total = $194.33B
From the above information, we see that Canada’s largest bank by market cap would be fourth-largest in the U.S., and that the five largest U.S. banks are collectively only worth two times that of the five largest Canadian banks.
According to the latest edition of The World Fact Book at https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/index.html, the nominal GDP of the U.S. was estimated to be $14.33 trillion in 2008, whereas Canada’s was estimated to be $1.564 trillion.
By this measure, the U.S. economy is 9.16 times bigger than the Canadian economy, yet the five largest U.S. banks are now collectively only 2 times bigger than the five largest Canadian banks.
These numbers should be setting off alarm bells in your mind as to the severity of the current U.S. banking crisis, if the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, collapse and subsequent acquisitions of Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch haven’t already.
[...] February 2009, I wrote how the Big Five Canadian banks were on pace to dwarf the five biggest U.S. banks, with the the five biggest U.S. banks having twice the market capitalization of the five biggest [...]