It is interesting looking at market cap of Citigroup v. say Westpac. Citi now $21b AUD versus Westpac of $50b.
Maybe a reflection of asset quality - our banks managed to avoid most of the toxic assets. Remember these US banks had huge books of CDO's etc and made billions out of trading these products. Now stuck with them. ALso US housing sucks badly - huge inventories yet to be sold.
On those numbers Westpac is now #9 bank in the world by market cap.
I think our stockmarket is performing better than the US simply because the finance sector is doing better. If you dropped the financials by a further 30-40% you'd see us making fresh lows too.
