Dow Jones average gets another bank

The banking industry’s troubles don’t scare the publisher of The Wall Street Journal. Dow Jones, the News Corp. (NWS) unit that publishes the Journal and oversees the widely followed Dow Jones Industrial Average, said Monday it will add Bank of America (BAC) and Chevron (CVX) to the 30-stock index next week. The changes are the first in four years for the blue-chip stock average. The bank and the oil company “are the two biggest U.S. companies by market capitalization which currently aren’t in the Dow industrials,” the Journal reports. They’ll replace Altria (MO), the cigarette maker that’s spinning off its international operations, and Honeywell (HON), the conglomerate that is the smallest company in the Dow 30 by revenue.

The addition of Bank of America comes as the financial services industry strains under the weight of massive writedowns tied to bad loans made during the recent debt boom. Germany’s finance minister warned this weekend that losses tied to the U.S. mortgage mess could hit $400 billion. Despite the presence of Citi (C) and JPMorgan Chase (JPM) in the Dow 30, Marcus Brauchli, the editor at the Journal who oversees the makeup of the index, says “we saw that the financials industry was under-represented - notwithstanding the current turbulence - and that the oil and gas industry’s growing importance to the world economy called for another representative” to join Exxon (XOM). Shares in Bank of America and Chevron rose modestly Monday. But if the writedowns keep coming, having another financial component could weigh on the Dow’s performance.