Don’t look now, but the financial sector is slipping quickly towards new multi-year lows.

The Select Sector SPDR – Financials (NYSEArca: XLF) closed today at $13.80/share, just 62 cents above its all-time low of $13.18/share, set on October 27. It’s now down 16% in the past four trading sessions, and is trading right about where it stood on October 7, when the U.S. House refused to pass the initial bailout package and many Americans (including me) thought another Great Depression was on its way.

Meanwhile, the news from the sector is unremittingly bleak.  The Feds have had to nearly double the size of the AIG bailout, from $84 billion to $153 billion. If you’re doing the math, that is $500 for every man, woman and child in the U.S. I say we just give them $1 trillion and be done with it.

Of course, it’s not just AIG. Fannie Mae reported a loss this week of $13/share for the third quarter, which is quite impressive when you consider the stock only trades for $0.72/share. Fannie says it might have to tap into the Fed’s $100 billion “lifeline.”

Even Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, two relatively strong companies, are at trading at multi-year lows. Citigroup’s shares now down 80% over the past year and trading well below the levels they were at during the worst of the credit crisis; some people think it’s on the ropes.

All that has me nervous. The credit crisis seems to have hit us in waves.  The Bear Stearns blow-up in March was the first big wave, followed by a mini-panic in July, and then capped off by the debacle of September and October. Now, things feel calm again, but the persistent and rapid decline in XLF is worrisome.

Or perhaps, it’s an opportunity. Throughout the crisis, I’ve been monitoring the TED Spread as the key “tell” on the level of concern among bankers. The TED Spread measures the willingness of banks to lend money to one another. It shot up in September and October from approximately 1% to 4.65%, an all-time high, as the credit markets froze up. To give you a feeling for how absurd 4.65% is, the TED Spread’s previous peak was just 3%, set on Black Monday in 1987.

But once the bailouts were in place, the TED Spread started to fall … tentatively at first, and then quickly.  Throughout October, it continued down, down, down. Today, I believe, was the 22^nd consecutive day that the TED spread has shrunk. It now stands at just 1.81%. That is still extremely elevated on a historical basis—the long-term average is something like 0.30%—but it’s back in the range we lived with for most of 2007 and 2008, and well off its panic high

As long as that TED spread keeps quieting down, it tells you that the institutional money is getting more comfortable, and that suggests things will turn out OK.

Then again, wasn’t it that institutional money that got us into this mess in the first place?  Maybe it is time to panic again…

Last 5 posts by Matt Hougan

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