Stock Market Update: Monday, August 24, 2009

A couple of weeks ago I passed along a link to a story about a mouse that had crawled into an ATM and made a nest out of some $20 bills in LaGrande, OR.  Well, apparently that story made it's way to Serbia and a bank there must have decided it was going to stop those evil, nest making mice in their tracks!  Or at least that's my best guess since a BOA CONSTRICTOR (or, as one commenter put it, a BofA CONSTRICTOR) was found on top of an ATM!  

In any event, the prospect of snakes on a mother freaking ATM is news apparently a bit much for investor's as about 3/4ths of the bank stocks I track were down today; while the Dow was up slightly.


Stock Price


By the way, although the link to the video in the article may not work for you, you should still take time to read the comments.  A number of them are pretty dang funny!

And one more thing.  In the event you like keeping up on the latest bank failures, Texas-based Guaranty Bank (Motto: Guaranty is our name but we're counting on the FDIC to take care of that for us) - the third largest bank failure in 2009 - was taken over the FDIC on Friday night.  This is the bank that (rumor has it) U.S. Bank made a bid for but lost out to a bank from Spain.  While I'm grateful U.S. Bancorp management didn't get sucked into paying more than a fair price for a failed bank, can you imagine the impact of adding 162 branches in Texas and California would have had? That would have been a big dang deal!