Nobel laureate Eric S.Mashin says it is because banks and financial institutions are too leveraged. Is that true?
For example, I don't have a dollar, but I have a mansion worth hundreds of million dollars, so I go to the bank to borrow $100 million, then isn't my leverage infinite? I have a colleague who has only a thousand dollars in cash and no house, so he also borrowed $100 million from the bank. His leverage ratio is smaller than mine. Is his loan behavior more safe than mine? Of course, you might say, he has no collateral and the bank will not lend to him. So there's a question here, the bank wants collateral, why not pay attention to his thousand dollars? That doesn't mean that banks actually know that what can withstand risk is collateral, not leverage?
Preprint Analysis of Financial Crisis Causes and Complex Systems Scie...