The 2009 performance of thirteen large US bank stocks is listed below:

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The worst performer is Citibank(C) which lost 50%. Despite bailed out by the tax payers with billions of dollars Citi could not recover like its peers. Citibank stock is now cheaper than the cost of a McDonald’s value meal.The best performing bank in the above list is JPMorgan Chase (JPM) which returned about 20% to investors. Regional giants such as Regions Financial (RF),US Bank(USB) and BB&T (BBT) ended in the negative territory for the year. While National City of Cleveland,Ohio was sacrificed by the Feds to PNC(PNC) , city rival Key Bank (KEY) survived the crisis but still the stock lost one third of its value.

Compared to the performance of the US banks above, many large cap foreign bank stocks yielded higher returns to investors. Of course there were also some foreign banks such as Lloyds and RBS of UK that were worse than above banks, but most of the other foreign banks recovered strongly from their March lows.