Savings Institutions

When we talked about savings institutions (financial intermediaries) in class, I kept using banks as an example. This is not the only example of a financial intermediary- there are Savings and Loan companies, credit unions (I believe that Harvard employees have a credit union) and finance companies (such as GM's loan arm, GMAC). For our purposes, these instituions basically function the same as banks. Furthermore, banks are the most important (i.e. widely used) financial intermediary. The 15% figure I gave in class would be for all financial intermediaries, but banks make up the vast majority of that number.