During the launch of IMF Regional Outlook a few months ago, Anoop Singh, the IMF director for the Asia-Pacific Region mentioned how the financial system is not ready for high-skilled service industry.
As his argument goes, banks usually demand collateral before providing any loans to businesses (or, mostly, anybody for that matter). This is perfectly fine for capital-intensive businesses but it becomes an issue when it comes to labor-intensive businesses. With little capital, there is little to function as meaningful concrete collateral. There are other things that can replace collateral like personal guarantee but such guarantee has to be credible and eventually means the businessowner’s personal assets. You still require some concrete assets in the end.
But what if you are nobody but you have a great idea that is labor-intensive?
Here, labor-intensive means just you and your partners maybe sitting down writing codes or running some weird but amazing business that, in the extreme for illustrative purpose, is one of pure brainpower, negligible capital requirement and no muscle, manned by individuals of limited wealth.
There are venture capitalists and that is usually the solution to the problem. But imagine a widespread proliferation of such industry that it becomes the dominant industry in an economy. Venture capital setup will be woefully inadequate as a source of funding.
The virtue of a bank (commercial bank) is its capability to pool large capital through aggregation of savings and to redistribute it elsewhere pretty painlessly. Venture capitalists are decidedly not as good as a traditional commercial bank at pooling resources.
This leads to a question, what is the solution?
I am unclear about that.
The banking system is inadequate as Mr. Singh points out but I am unsure if banks should evolve to not require concrete collateral to accommodate for the so-called new service industry if ever we come to that fork. Identifying a problem, while helpful, is very different from formulating a solution.
And an evolved banking system designed to not require collateral sounds like recipe for a banking crisis. A large percentage of businesses fail and without collateral, the banking system of such evolved banks would quickly be brought down to their knees. And a banking crisis, in the modern economy, will quickly turn into a widespread, horrible, economic crisis.
What about the government?
The problem of business failures will still be relevant but at least it addresses the banking system concern by socializing losses. I doubt the taxpayers will be happy with that.