Chart: America's Largest Banks by Assets

I can't tell you how many times I've called one bank or another "the nation's second (or third, or whatever) largest bank by assets" to help put the bank I'm writing about into context. After doing this countless times, however, I figured that what would really help from a contextual standpoint is a chart. What follows, in turn, is a graph of the nation's largest lenders -- all but one of which has assets in excess of $20 billion.

Source: Standard & Poor's Capital IQ.

While it's not obvious from the chart, you can separate these institutions into three different buckets. The first bucket concerns the most widely discussed too-big-to-fail banks: JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, and Wells Fargo. Then comes the unofficial too-big-to-fail lenders (those with assets in excess of $50 billion and thus subject to the Federal Reserve's more stringent stress test process). This group contains U.S. Bank , PNC Financial , and BB&T Bank , among others. And the final group encompasses lesser-known banks like First Niagara Financial and People's United Financial with between $20 billion and $50 billion in assets.

For those of you interested in bank stocks, I encourage you to use this list to consider diversifying your holdings from those institutions at the top of the list to some closer to the bottom. As I discussed here, it's at the bottom where you'll often find the best returns.

With big finance firms still trading at deep discounts to their historic norms, investors everywhere are wondering if this is the new normal, or if finance stocks are a screaming buy today. The answer depends on the company, so to help figure out whether U.S. Bancorp is a buy today, I invite you to read our premium research report on the company. Click here now for instant access!

The article Chart: America's Largest Banks by Assets originally appeared on Fool.com.

John Maxfield has no position in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool owns shares of PNC Financial Services. Try any of our Foolish newsletter services free for 30 days. We Fools may not all hold the same opinions, but we all believe that considering a diverse range of insights makes us better investors. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

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