Warehouse Banking∗
WAREHOUSE BANKING∗ Jason Roderick Donaldson Giorgia Piacentino Anjan Thakor Washington University in St. Louis September 21, 2016 Abstract We develop a theory of banking that explains why banks started out as commodities warehouses. We show that warehouses become banks because their superior storage technology allows them to enforce the repayment of loans most effectively. Further, interbank markets emerge endogenously to support this enforcement mechanism. Even though warehouses store deposits of real goods, they make loans by writing new “fake” warehouse receipts, rather than by taking deposits out of storage. Our theory helps to explain how modern banks create funding liquidity and why they combine warehousing (custody and deposit-taking), lending, and private money creation within the same institutions. It also casts light on a number of contemporary regulatory policies. ∗For their helpful comments, we thank Franklin Allen, Vladimir Asriyan, Ulf Axelson, Juliane Begenau, Philip Bond, Liam Brunt, Mike Burkart, Doug Diamond, Leo Ferraris, Colm Friel, Nicolae Gârleanu, Anand Goel, Itay Goldstein, Charles Goodhart, Denis Gromb, Chao Gu, Charles Kahn, Bill Keaton, Peter Koudijs, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Yaron Leitner, Ben Lester, Andrey Malenko, Nadya Malenko, Ernst Maug, Martin Oehmke, Clemens Otto, George Pennacchi, Uday Rajan, Adriano Rampini, Daniel Sanches, Tano Santos, Joel Shapiro, Carolyn Sissoko, Janis Skrastins, Javier Suarez, Neng Wang, Lucy White, Andrew Winton, Randy Wright, Tanju Yorulmazer and seminar participants at the 6th Bank of Portugal Conference on Financial Intermediation, the 2015 Colorado Finance Summit, the 2015 Summer Symposium at Gerzensee, the 2015 European Winter Finance Conference, the 2015 IDC Summer Finance Conference, the IMF, the 10th Jackson Hole Finance Conference, the 2016 LBS Financial Intermediation Conference, the 7th Conference on Money, Banking, and Asset Markets at UW-Madison, the 2016 Mitsui Finance Symposium at the University of Michigan, the 2015 Summer Money Workshop at the St.
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