摘要：Financial intermediaries, such as banks, perform many roles: they screen risks, evaluate and fund worthy entrepreneurs, pool risks, monitor borrowers, refinance projects, and—when confronted with the default in their loans—they perform a valuable role in loss discovery and assessing whether the bankrupt concern is economically viable or not. All these activities, which constitute the actions of a bank in what concerns the asset side of its balance sheet, need to be funded, and much depends on how the bank structures its liabilities to obtain these funds, whether with time deposits, short- or long-term debt, equity, or other more novel forms of short-term financing such as commercial paper or repo transactions. Independently of the particular liability structure adopted by financial intermediaries, it typically involves some form of maturity transformation. For instance, bank deposits, which are available on demand, are transformed into longer-maturity loans to finance projects. Maturity mismatch is almost inherent in the intermediation business.
