The Top 12 U.S. Banks: From Zombies to Hidden Gems By Martin Hutchinson Contributing Editor

U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner last week proposed a series of programs, totaling $1.5 trillion, to bail out the U.S. banking system. Of course, Geithner hasn’t told us precisely how he plans to spend the money, or identified which banks require such an enormous outlay.

So I thought it was worth looking at the United States’ 12 largest banks to see where the problems might be and identify which banks might need big infusions of government cash. I perused the financial statements of all 12 banks, and also looked at their market valuations.

Unlike when the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) was proposed in September - when the projections for potential losses were largely financial conjecture - we now have important concrete data on the banking system’s troubles; namely, each of the bank’s annual financial reports for 2008.

Those figures were calculated with the most current knowledge of the economy’s housing crisis and other related financial disasters, and with the potential for losses on "bad assets" fully taken into account and examined in detail by auditors. Further economic bad news might weaken new batches of assets, but at least the biggest problems should by now be fully apparent.