FINANCIAL MARKET AND RISK

Financial Market and Risk



Financial Market and Risk

Question 1

When a banker starts to study the theory of financial intermediation in order to better understand what he has done during his professional life, he enters a world unknown to him. That world is full of concepts which he did not, or hardly, knew before and full of expressions he never used himself: asymmetric information, adverse selection, monitoring, costly state verification, moral hazard and a couple more of the same kind. He gets the uneasy feeling that a growing divergence has emerged between the microeconomic theory of banking, as it took shape in the last three decades, and the everyday behavior of bankers according to their business motives, expressed in the language they use (Cem, 2000, 87). This reflects on the merits of the present theory of financial intermediation, on what it does and does not explain from both a practical and a theoretical point of view. The theory is impressive by the multitude of applications in the financial world of the agency theory and the theory of asymmetric information, of adverse selection and moral hazard.

As well as by their relevance for important aspects of the financial intermediation process, as is shown in an ever-growing stream of economic studies. But the study of all these theories leaves the practitioner with the impression that they do not provide a satisfactory answer to the basic question; which forces really drive the financial intermediation process? We believe that this question cannot be addressed by a further extension of the present theory, by the framework of the agency theory and the theory of asymmetric information. The question goes into the heart of the present theory, into the paradigm on which it is based. This paradigm is the famous classical idea of the perfect market, introduced by Marshall and Walras.

Since then, it has been the leading principle, the central point of reference in the theory of competition, the neoclassical growth theory, the portfolio theory and also the leading principle of the present theory of financial intermediation. Financial intermediaries, according to that theory, have a function only because financial markets are not perfect. They exist by the grace of market imperfections. As long as there are market imperfections, there are intermediaries. As soon as markets are perfect, intermediaries are redundant; they have lost their function because savers and investors dispose of the perfect information needed to find each other directly, immediately and without any impediments, so without costs, and to deal at optimal prices. This is the general equilibrium model à la Arrow-Debreu in which banks cannot exist. Obviously, this contrasts with the huge economic and social importance of financial intermediaries in highly developed modern economies. Empirical observations point at an increasing role for financial intermediaries in economies that experience vastly decreasing information and transaction costs. Our essay goes into this paradox and comes up with an amendment of the existing theory of financial intermediation.

Question 2

With the aim of understanding the impact ...