U.S. Bancorp earnings expected to fall 11%

Posted Jan 12th 2008 12:19PM by Peter Cohan
Filed under: Earnings Reports, Forecasts

For more earnings forecasts, see Peter Cohan's Earnings expectations for 10 banks tell a mixed story.

Thomson Financial expects U.S. Bancorp (NYSE: USB) to earn $0.59 when it announces its fourth-quarter earnings on January 15th. That's 11% below the same period in 2006, when it earned $0.66.

U.S. Bancorp is a Minneapolis, MN-based bank operating in four lines of business: Wholesale Banking, Payment Services, Wealth Management and Consumer Banking. In the last year its revenues were $13 billion and its net income totaled $4.5 billion. Its stock has lost 15.8% of its value in the last year and it trades at a P/E of 11.7.

It has a mixed track record of delivering actual earnings vs expected ones. In the second quarter of 2007, it fell 3% below expectations and in the third quarter it beat by 1.5%. My hunch is that it will miss by a little.

Peter Cohan is president of Peter S. Cohan & Associates. He also teaches management at Babson College and edits The Cohan Letter. He has no financial interest in U.S. Bancorp securities.

Tags: bank stocks, banks, BankStocks, earnings, financials, forecasts, U.S. Bancorp, U.s.Bancorp, USB