The current correction provides a good opportunity for a new short of the financial sector

As investors weigh the drastic gains on Wall Street against the backdrop of widespread unemployment and shuttered small businesses on Main Street, the performance of bank stocks may prove to be a crucial barometer of whether markets can sustain their exuberance. Few analysts dispute that shares of financial companies are cheap on a relative basis — but sometimes prices are depressed for good reasons. Inexpensiveness alone isn’t a compelling enough reason to expect banks to bounce back as they did in 2009.

Investors have a few obvious reasons to be wary of U.S. banks. For one, long-term interest rates are near record lows while traders have started to wager on negative short-term rates, even as Federal Reserve officials repeatedly question the policy. All this points to lower net interest income, a crucial metric that reflects the spread between what a company earns on its loans and what it pays on its deposits. Meanwhile, large banks have already halted share buybacks, and minutes from April’s Federal Open Market Committee meeting revealed that policy makers are debating whether they should also restrict their ability to pay dividends to shareholders during the pandemic.

If that’s the case, investors will likely look back on the past few weeks as a time when bank stocks became far too cheap compared with other parts of the market. Yet Tuesday’s seemingly huge rally still leaves financial companies worth far less than before the pandemic, and it seems reasonable to expect they’ll remain that way for a while. After all, it’s anyone’s guess just how many loans will end up going bad and saddle banks with losses.