Are banks really special? A note on the theory of financial intermediaries

Economic theory has not paid much attention to the topic of firm financing; this lack of interest was common to the two principal macroeconomic theories, the Keynesian theory and the Monetarist one. This work considers two important exceptions to the mainstream theory. The first coincides with Tobin’s theory. The second exception is constituted by the asymmetric information approach. These two approaches define in a different way the role of banks; Tobin elaborates a ‘new view’ which, in contrast with the ‘old view’, maintains that there are no reasons to attribute a special role to the banks. In contrast with Tobin’s theory, the supporters of the AI approach attribute a special role to the banks but, unlike the ‘old view’, they think that banks’ specificity is justified by the characteristics of their assets rather than by the characteristics of their liabilities. The objective of this paper is twofold: a) to analyse critically Tobin’s approach and the asymmetric information approach; b) to elaborate a theory of financial intermediaries which get over the limits of these two approaches.