Bill Gross warns on gold momentum as regional bank stocks tumble
Investing.com - Banking stocks showed signs of steadying after facing added pressure in premarket U.S. trading on Friday, as a relatively strong slate of earnings from the financial sector helped counterbalance ongoing worries over the credit health of regional U.S. lenders.
Shares of Zions Bancorporation were trading more than 2% higher prior to the opening bell on Wall Street, after the lender slid by over 13% on Thursday. Peer Western Alliance also ticked up by 1.6%.
Major Wall Street lenders were hovering not far from the flatline. JPMorgan Chase inched up marginally, while rivals Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and Citigroup edged down slightly.
Yet the jitters appeared to be spreading beyond the U.S., with Barclays in the United Kingdom and Germany’s Deutsche Bank both sliding by more than 5% in European trading. The Europe-wide gauge of the banking sector also dipped by 2.3%.
Japanese lenders and insurers were the worst-hit in Asia, given that several local firms have heavy exposure to U.S. markets.
Lenders Mizuho Financial Group and Sumitomo Mitsui Financial fell 4.0% and 3.1%, respectively, while insurers Sompo Holdings Inc and Tokio Marine Holdings sank 4.7% and 3.5%.
In the prior session, a negative credit update from Zions heaped fuel on to growing concerns around the fallout of the high-profile collapses of U.S. auto parts supplier First Brands and car dealership TriColor earlier this year.
Along with a tumble in shares of Zions, Western Alliance also shed more than 10% of its value on Thursday following an announcement that it had initiated a fraud lawsuit against one of its borrowers. The updates pushed up U.S. Treasury yields, weighing on the wider U.S. stock market.
Investors were now gauging quarterly regional bank results to see how these businesses are faring, with Fifth Third and Comerica among a slew of these companies reporting on Friday.
"[B]ottom line: results this morning for all the banks were pretty robust, especially compared to the credit-related panic of the last couple of sessions. We still don’t think there is a broad/systemic credit issue, with the problems (for now) isolated to a few high-profile situations," analysts at Vital Knowledge wrote in a note.