Don’t bank on these shares

The new blog challenge: put these in order of how awful they’ve been since the euro was created:

• Greek banks
• Irish banks
• Spanish banks
• Italian banks
• French banks
• British banks
• German banks
• American banks

It is a serious challenge, given how much everyone hates all the banks. But if forced to choose, the order might reasonably go something like the above – the periphery, in order of rescue, middling eurozone, then the Brits (many of them already nationalised, plus the Libor-struck Barclays), followed by under-capitalised Germans and finally the resurgent Americans as the best of a bad bunch.

Equity investors don’t seem to share this view, as this great chart shows.