Author: John Mason

In my experience there are three ways for bankers with “bad” assets to move on.First, the bank can “work out” the bad assets, but this takes time and in some cases a lot of luck.The “lot of...

“The bare minimum the eurozone needs to cope with its crisis is an effective mechanism for writing down the debts of evidently insolvent private and sovereign borrowers, such as Greece; funds large enough to manage the illiquid...

Credit inflation impacts asset values.  In a credit inflation, the expansion of credit takes place at a faster rate of growth than does the rate of increase in the production of the underlying assets.  Credit inflation can...

As I have written before, the United States economy is recovering.  It may not be recovering as fast as some would like, but economic growth is positive.  Economic growth is not as rapid as some would like because there is still...

Remember the old story about commercial banks?  Commercial banks only lend to people who don’t need to borrow. Well, that seems to be the “truth” about bank lending now.  The story going around is that the larger banks have...

Yesterday, President Obama proposed a tax plan.  George Shultz has replied: “rich people and large companies like General Electric Co. are the beneficiaries of a complicated tax system.” “It’s wealthy people and the GEs of the...

First, we need to define whatthe Federal Reserve calls “Small” banks. The Federal Reserve defines small banks as domestically chartered banksthat are not counted among the largest 25 domestically chartered banks in theUnited...

According to Matt Wirz in his article “Banks Apply Lever to Cash Positions” in the Wall Street Journal, this morning...