Financial Intermediation
Financial Intermediation
This chapter deals with the mobility of capital. Romans made many investments in agriculture, cities, and roads, all of which are capital. They accumulated the needed capital with the help of Roman banks, which were remarkably similar to the first modern commercial banks in eighteenth-century London. In order to evaluate the sophistication of the Roman financial market, the chapter inquires about the presence of credit intermediaries—institutions that mediated between borrowers and lenders, obviating direct contact between them. It then presents a theory of financial intermediation to describe the hierarchy of financial sources and its relation to the functioning of the economy as a whole. This facilitates an abstract evaluation of the Roman evidence, but not a historical one.
Keywords: capital mobility, Roman banks, commercial banks, Roman financial market, credit intermediaries, financial intermediation, economy
Princeton Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
