> "If you take away the deposits, who has that much money to lend out without being dangerously leveraged?"
mortgages don't have to go through retail banks, and there are plenty of other transaction fees to support banks of all sorts.
in fact, there's no reason we should have allowed the consolidation of banking other than to allow rent-seekers to amalgamate more sources of relatively risk-free cash flows under the control of fewer and greedier hands. we could have maintained lots of small banks that serve the community and region, enriching those communities, rather than a few behemoths that strip-mine them.
a lot of the "work" of mortgages is really mindless paper-shuffling by other rent-seekers taking their little slice of the large transaction price. none of those service providers go away if the government decided to take over (not that i'm advocating such a takeover).
mortgages don't have to go through retail banks, and there are plenty of other transaction fees to support banks of all sorts.
in fact, there's no reason we should have allowed the consolidation of banking other than to allow rent-seekers to amalgamate more sources of relatively risk-free cash flows under the control of fewer and greedier hands. we could have maintained lots of small banks that serve the community and region, enriching those communities, rather than a few behemoths that strip-mine them.
a lot of the "work" of mortgages is really mindless paper-shuffling by other rent-seekers taking their little slice of the large transaction price. none of those service providers go away if the government decided to take over (not that i'm advocating such a takeover).