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Banks can be considered the back bone of any nations economy and financial system. They make money available to industries and people by means of loans and also provide opportunities for people to deposit money and earn interest out of it.

It acts as a facilitator between people who have money and who need money.

Banking was a very productive industry in past history when it enabled the expansion of trade, commerce and industrialization. During the late 19th and early 20th century there was a structural deflation caused by falling commodity prices as the result of modern industry. Falling prices were a result of productivity under the gold standard. As a result interest rates fell and people did not need to deposit money in banks and collect interest. People did not want to borrow because the real value of their loans would be higher. Ending the gold standard was good for banking because people then wanted to collect interest, and of course the banks collected more on their loans.

Eventually productivity declined and people borrowed money against real estate with hopes that the value of the loans would be less in real terms due to inflation. This lead to tremendous excesses in housing (actually land) values and priced future home buyers out of the market. As housing values collapsed it left the banks holding mortgages on houses worth less than their loan value. Today many banks are insolvent and being supported by the government.

So while banks may have provided valuable services in the past, their recent role was to cause massive distortions in the economy. Also, banking reached a high point of being 7.5% or the U.S. economy, which is way out of proportion to any good they actually did.

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