Author: John Mason

The big bankers areprojecting more bad news for their third quarter performance.  A discussion of this can be found in the NewYork Times article “Banks Brace for a Season of Fall-Offs”...

Excess reserves in the commercial banking system did not change much over the past quarter.  The two-week average for the banking week ending September 7, 2011 was $1, 569 billion.  At the start of August the total was $1,602...

Yesterday I discussed the concern Bill Gross, founder and co-chief investment officer of PIMCO, has about the current Federal Reserve policy of keeping short-term interest rates low for the next two years.  The concern extends...

PIMCO’s founder and co-chief investment officer Bill Gross presents an interesting perspective on the US government’s policy of credit inflation policy over the last fifty years in the Financial Times this morning....

The world has changed!Of course, entrenched interests fight the change.An instance is the United States Postal Service:  we heard over the weekend that the Post Office faces the possibility of bankruptcy. The high profile cause...

The August unemployment rate was 9.1 percent.  Not much joy in Mudville. About one in five Americans in the prime age for working range remain under-employed.  We have the short-run problem related to economic growth and the...

Here we are, how many years after the start of the financial crisis, and we still have questions about the status of individual banks and the banking system…in both the United States and Europe.European banks have gone through...

Martin Wolf of the Financial Times recently returned from vacation.   It is interesting to see where this “top” economic commentator stands after taking off from his weekly writing for a full month.  His view on his return: The...

At the top of my Financial Times this morning reads the blurb: “Did Ben Bernanke Drop the Ball Over QE3?”  This is reference to an editorial by Clive Cook....