Bank
Starting out as places that would guard your money, banks became the main source of credit creation. Increasingly, however, borrowers are turning to the financial markets and to non-savings institutions, such as credit-card companies and consumer-finance firms, when they need a loan. This is reducing the profitability of traditional bank lending and has led many banks to enter new areas of business, such as selling insurance policies and mutual funds. Increasingly, too, traditional banks are selling off parcels of their loans in the financial markets by a process called securitisation.
What the most efficient split is between bank lending and other sorts of lending is debatable. Economists argue endlessly about whether an economy such as the United States, in which firms rely more heavily on the equity and debt markets than on banks to fund their investment, is better than one such as, say, Germany, in which banks have traditionally been the main source of corporate finance.
Banks come in many different forms. Commercial banks, also known as retail banks, cater directly for the general public and lend to (mostly small and medium-sized) firms. In the past, they did so largely through a network of bank branches, although increasingly these are giving way to atm machines, the telephone and the Internet. Wholesale banks largely transact with other banks and financial institutions. Investment banks, also known as merchant banks, concentrate on raising money for companies from private investors or in the financial markets, by finding buyers for their equity and corporate bonds. Universal banks do most or all of the above including, through bancassurance, selling insurance. These banks have long been a feature of continental European economies. However, in the United States financial laws such as the Glass-Steagall Act have separated different forms of banking from each other and kept banks out of the insurance business. These laws were abolished in 1999, although during the preceding couple of decades regulators effectively dismantled them by changing the way they were applied. Even so, because of these and other laws, which for many years stopped banks from operating across state borders, the United States has far more lending institutions than other countries. In 2003 there were over four lending institutions per 100,000 people in the United States, compared with fewer than one per 100,000 in the UK and France.
"