In an overlapping generations economy with (incomplete) financial markets but no intermediaries, there is underinvestment in safe assets. In an economy with intermediaries and no financial markets, accumulating reserves of safe assets allows returns to be smoothed, nondiversifiable risk to be...

Most analyses of banking crises assume that banks use real contracts. However, in practice, contracts are nominal and this is what is assumed here. We consider a standard banking model with aggregate return risk, aggregate liquidity risk and idiosyncratic liquidity shocks. We show that, with...