1. What are the economic functions financial intermediaries perform?
Financial intermediaries provide two important advantages to savers. First, intermediaries provide many loans, so the few that fall short do not impact as much as a the loss faced by an individual with few loans. They provide a platform to incur less risk to each individual. Another reason financial intermediaries reduce risk is that by making many loans, they learn how to better predict which of the people who want to borrow money will be able to repay. Someone who does not specialize in this lending may be a poor judge of which loans are worth making and which are not, though even a specialist will make some mistakes. A second advantage of using a financial intermediary is they have the ability to convert assets into liquid (useable) money. Although the intermediary may use its funds to make illiquid loans, its size allows it to hold some funds idle as cash to provide liquidity to individual depositors.......
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