How much has banking changed? – value of banks from 2007 to today

The market capitalization of banks has shrunk remarkably over the last two years. ( Market cap is the worth of a publicly traded company. ) Below we provide a point of comparison for the latest data available as of this morning (2/20/2009). The outer circle is the market cap of the largest banks in 2007, and the inner circle is size of the bank as of today. Both data points are in Billions of dollars.

There has been some confusion about a previous graph released by JP Morgan. JP Morgan’s research team had released a graph that compared the data points using circles, but used the diameter as the ratio instead of the area. This is misleading, as a circle show two dimensions and not one. The graph above corrects these mistakes.

Taking a look at the raw data below, we see that the largest banks in 2007 are no longer the largest banks today.

If we re-rank these banks in order of largest market cap today, we see that HSBC is the new largest bank. The full list is below.

List of largest banks by market cap