Regional bank stocks: Are there buying opportunities investors should be looking at?

Are there any regionals that you're particularly bullish on? I mean, if you are brave enough to get in, even after the kind of sell-off that we saw this week, are there potential opportunities on the back of that? Yeah, there's always opportunities. You know, we are neutral on the group, so we're being pretty selective. But I would say, I would give it to you like this. New York Community, which is the bank that we've talked about before with you, we upgraded that stock after they did the signature deal. They bought signature from the FDIC. They were paid multiple billions of dollars to take it off the FDIC's hand. So they immediately grew tangible book.

That's a stock that had a great quarter. The stock was up very, very nicely last week as recently. And so that's a stock with a 7% yield, trading at book value, and the balance sheets in great shape. You know, one of the things we've talked a lot about is Western Alliance. That is your deep value play. That's 70% of tangible book. Very volatile stock.

So those are two. And then in between, we really like East-West. East-West is a bank in California. It's about 60, 65 billion in assets. They have a tremendous amount of capital. Now, they've been building capital over the last 15 years following the financial crisis. This is a stock that trades just about tangible book.

They've got 13% common equity tier one. They do not have the bond loss problem that others do. And they've been waiting for moments like this to deploy that capital. I don't know if it's the next six months, but it's a big deal. But this is a balance sheet that's really, really well positioned. Of course, despite a lot of the reassurance that we got from some of the big bank CEOs this week, despite what we heard from Powell, investors still clearly very nervous, very worried about what has been playing out within regionals. How long do you think it's going to take to restore that confidence? It'll take time.

We know that we will emerge from this crisis. We always do. I think investors are really trying to identify when. When is the regulation? One of the regulators in the government going to step in? What is their max pain point from a bank perspective? Because what we're seeing now is we're seeing this spread and this contagion fear really just permeate the market. And what they don't want to do is create more of an issue because the banks have great balance sheets. They have a lot of capital. They have a lot of liquidity that deposits have stabilized.

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