Author: John Mason

Commercial banking in the United States is going to change substantially in the next five years. Most of my comments on the banking industry over the past year have been spent on the “smaller” banks, the banks are...

Yesterday, I attempted to lay out how I thought 2011 would play out in terms of the value of the United States dollar. In “The U. S. Dollar in 2001” (http://seekingalpha.com/article/242766-the-u-s-dollar-in-2011) I...

I still believe that the long term trend for the United States dollar is downward. For the near term, for 2011, I believe that the United States dollar will remain relatively strong, at least against the other major currencies...

Henry Kaufman, the Wall Street economist who formerly worked and gained his reputation as “Dr. Doom” at Salomon Brothers, Inc., has an op-ed piece in the Financial Times that raises a point that should be considered....

The 10-year United States Treasury issue backed off somewhat today. At 4:00 pm in New York the bond yielded about 3.43 percent, up from about 3.23 percent last week at this time. On Wednesday December 15, these bonds yielded...

Why would financial institutions want to put home mortgages on their balance sheets right now?Answer: they really don’t want to add mortgages to their balance sheets.The consequence is that very tight credit standards...

If the economy needs the banking sector to get healthy before it begins to grow we are still waiting for the banks to show some signs of life.In the past few months, loans and leases in the commercial banking system continued to...

Federal actions on QE2 have been relatively benign up to this week. (See my Monday post: http://seekingalpha.com/article/240375-federal-reserve-qe2-watch-part-1.)Things were different this week as the United States Treasury...

What do I think of the Dodd-Frank Financial Reform legislation?I can’t express it better than this: The Dodd-Frank Financial Reform Act is already “legacy”.

Quantitative Easing, Part 2 has begun. As I wrote on November 4, 2010, “The Fed is going to purchase an additional $600 billion in US Treasury securities over the next eight months, or $75 billion per month, in order to...