By Ellis Mnyandu
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stocks were set to dip at the open on Friday, weighed by a drop in financial shares after Britain's Lloyds Banking Group
The Lloyds announcement punctured some of the optimism fueled by Thursday's news that the Obama administration was creating a plan to subsidize mortgage payments for troubled homeowners.
Shares of Bank of America
"Predominantly it was because of the Lloyds Bank earnings release over in London," said Tim Smalls, head of U.S. stock trading at brokerage firm Execution LLC in Greenwich, Connecticut. "That put pressure on all the global financials and that drove us down."
S&P 500 futures fell 5 points, and were below fair value, a formula that evaluates pricing by taking into account interest rates, dividends and time to expiration on the contract. Dow Jones industrial average futures declined 48 points, and Nasdaq 100 futures were off 6.25 points.
Lloyds said its HBOS subsidiary lost about 8.5 billion pounds ($12.28 billion) last year, while its Lloyds TSB unit made a profit of about 1.3 billion pounds.
Worries about the banks would mark a significant hurdle for the market teetering on the verge of retesting its November bear market lows.
There remains persistent concern about a lack of clarity about how the Obama administration would relieve U.S. banks of money-losing assets.
On the economic data front, the Reuters/University of Michigan U.S. consumer sentiment report for February is due at 9:55 a.m. EST, with the main index expected to ease to 61.0 from 61.2.
(Additional reporting by Leah Schnurr; Editing by James Dalgleish)
