摘要：Arrange our principal financial intermediaries from most to least "troubled." You get: (1) savings and loan associations; (2) commercial and mutual banks; (3) insurance companies; (4) pension funds; (5) investment banks; (6) mutual funds. There is a pattern: the more regulated the intermediary, the closer it seems to the brink. This is no coincidence. It is all but inevitable and will remain so no matter how skillful and well intentioned the regulators. 1 Regulation means reducing the firm's opportunities. Some things become illegal; others require permission and are hedged about with "safeguards"; still others are taxed. Banks do not make any distinctive product and have no captive customers. All financial intermediaries assemble capital from persons willing to postpone consumption (in exchange for a greater payment in the future) and invest in projects with payoffs that should enable them to fulfill their bargains with the suppliers of capital. Anything banks can do, other intermediaries can do. Pension funds and insurance companies finance the same sorts of buildings in which banks invest; investment banks buy and sell commercial paper that is a substitute for loans from banks; mortgage brokers make loans to householders; money market funds issue drafts that work the same as checks. In recent decades innovations in capital markets have made it easier to assemble capital through mutual funds, to market commercial paper, and so on; insurers and pension funds have increased in size as vehicles for deferred consumption. Banks will prosper only ...
