Shadow Banking and the Four Pillars of Traditional Financial Intermediation

Traditional retail banking (and, by default, shadow banking) is built on four pillars: SME lending, access to public liquidity, deposit insurance, and prudential supervision. But many shadow financial institutions (money market mutual funds, hedge funds and investment banks) gained access to public liquidity facilities during the 2008 crisis. In this working paper, EconPol expert Jean Tirole and his co-author Emmanuel Farhi, ask whether, in the light of recent developments, it is time to reconsider the time-honored SME lending/regulation/ public liquidity access/ deposit insurance quadrilogy?