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PART III

Financial Institutions

with higher interest rates. As mentioned earlier, this process of asset transformation is frequently described by saying that banks are in the business of “borrowing short and lending long.” For example, if the loans have an interest rate of 10% per year, the bank earns $9 in income from its loans over the year. If the $100 of checkable deposits is in a NOW account with a 5% interest rate and it costs another $3 per year to service the account, the cost per year of these deposits is $8. The bank’s profit on the new deposits is then $1 per year (a 1% return on assets).

General Principles of Bank Management
Now that you have some idea of how a bank operates, let’s look at how a bank manages its assets and liabilities in order to earn the highest possible profit. The bank manager has four primary concerns. The first is to make sure that the bank has enough ready cash to pay its depositors when there are deposit outflows, that is, when deposits are lost because depositors make withdrawals and demand payment. To keep enough cash on hand, the bank must engage in liquidity management, the acquisition of sufficiently liquid assets to meet the bank’s obligations to depositors. Second, the bank manager must pursue an acceptably low level of risk by acquiring assets that have a low rate of default and by diversifying asset holdings (asset management). The third concern is to acquire funds at low cost (liability management). Finally, the manager must decide the amount of capital the bank should maintain and then acquire the needed capital (capital adequacy management). To understand bank and other financial institution management fully, we must go beyond the general principles of bank asset and liability management described next and look in more detail at how a financial institution manages its assets. The two sections following