[notahacker]

An alternative way of putting it is that

(1) Because maturity transformation is no longer permitted, every time somebody wishes to take out, say, a mortgage, the bank has to find somebody who has >$200k they're not even going to consider spending for quarter of a century. As a result, costs of borrowing go massively up, which is bad for everybody except for a small proportion of rentiers sufficiently wealthy to be entirely unworried by liquidity. Joe Sixpack proves to be even less adept at managing an overnight lending portfolio than full time professional bankers, and loses money as a result.

(2) The money supply is artificially "set" at a particular level on the basis of the unambiguously false assumption that real resources do not change over time rather than being allowed to fluctuate and grow to properly align itself with creditworthy borrowers' growth projections in a way commensurate with price stability. The boom bust cycle is replaced by permanent bust.

[a008t]

1. Could maturity transformation not be done by the markets? E.g. if you want a mortgage, you essentially issue a bond; lenders may then decide to hold the bond for a short period of time and then sell it on the secondary market. With regards to consumer products, I am sure the market would come up with something user-friendly. But I see your point.

2. The money supply could grow predictably, e.g. like Friedman's proposal of replacing the Fed with a computer that expands the money supply in a predictable manner.

[notahacker]

1. Banks are a market solution to maturity transformation (it's just that doing maturity transformation without frequent liquidity crises needs access to more short term borrowing facilities than private capital markets can offer). Treating mortgages as tradable financial products instead of obligations the issuer should be happy to keep on their balance sheet was the cause of the bad underwriting that led to the financial crisis, not the solution to it.

2. Friedman's k% rule is better than a fixed money supply, but it's still every bit as arbitrary and further removed from the relevant market indicators of resource constraints (creditworthy borrower demand and price inflation) than the current system.