Value investors have been burned before on financial stocks, especially the big commercial bank stocks and the likes of Fannie Mae. It's so tempting to believe that the selling is overdone when they drop so precipitously. But would buying in now be to commit the same mistake that the likes of Bill Miller made in the aftermath of the financial crisis?

Perhaps leery of being burned again, investors aren't exactly streaming in. So is this an opportunity? Forbes notes a comment to clients put out by none other than ubiquitous analyst Richard Bove, who believes:

"These banks have market capitalizations below the liquidation values of the companies even when the liquidation values are 100 percent cash. The CDS values suggest that the companies cannot raise funds in the open market again. If the market valuations are correct, then the American banking industry must be nationalized. This must happen because according to the CDS values and the price to liquidation values these companies simply have no value. Is this correct, however? I personally do not think that it is even remotely true and that hysteria has taken hold of the markets and that reality is being ignored."

So is it time to somehow short bank CDSs and gobble up the stocks like Bank of America, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley? In the throes of global uncertainty, nothing is a sure bet. There may be another shoe to drop, but no one thinks that failure is even remotely possible at this point, though we might see Bank of America put Countrywide into bankruptcy court. That said, a falling stock price can be a real problem. If the crisis of confidence gets bad enough, we could see a run on prime brokerage assets. As of now, we're nowhere near that.  

 For more:
- here's the Forbes item

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