Bank stocks ended the week in negative territory, as a number of banking companies completed their stock offerings and investors turned their attention back to the economy.
The KBW Bank Index fell 1.87%, ending the week off 2.65%.
"There were a lot of capital raises this week, which was a culmination of the stress test process," said Walter "Bucky" Hellwig, senior vice president of Regions Financial Corp.'s Morgan Asset Management. "It's akin to all the good news being in those stocks, and it's an opportune to time to take profit."
Investors are now refocusing on economic issues, Hellwig said, "specifically with regard whether we're going to continue to have the green shoots or whether they are going to whither away."
Decliners included Bank of America Corp., which fell 3%, JPMorgan Chase & Co., 1.4%, Wells Fargo & Co., 2.9%, U.S. Bancorp, 1.6%, SunTrust Banks Inc., 6%, Marshall & Ilsley Corp., 5.5%, Regions Financial Corp., 6 cents to $4.04 and Citigroup Inc., 5 cents to $3.67.
Gainers included M&T Bank Corp., 0.3%, Cullen/Frost Bankers Inc., 0.4% and People's United Financial Inc. in Bridgeport, Conn., 1.2%.
The Dow Jones industrial average fell 0.18% and the Standard & Poor's, 0.15%.
Eugenio J. Aleman, a senior economist at Wells Fargo, wrote in a note Friday that U.S. monetary policy should not be politicized.
"In some sense the Federal Reserve attacked the bursting of the dot.com bubble and the effects of the September 11 attacks with more money, creating a new and bigger bubble in the housing market," Aleman wrote. "Now, the extremely expansionary monetary and fiscal policy we are following could be the harbinger of an even worse event to come. Thus, we need monetary policy and monetary policymakers to remain independent of the political process so they can correctly bring this unorthodox monetary experiment to a successful conclusion."
