to think we'd be better off without the banks

[lexiepix]

The banks allow house prices to go to crazy levels by allowing people to get into eye watering debt. If it wasn't for the banks, houses would be much cheaper and people wouldn't have debt, that is just modern slavery. Imagine a house that just cost 2 years wage, no banks just save up and buy it outright. Or am i being stupid? Banks seem to make everyone poorer apart from themselves.

Say what now?

?
Obviously if banks all just shut up shop economies and thus society would be in chaos.

But that doesn't mean that things can't be done differently.
Other forms of currency systems could work, the useful and necessary functions now carried out by banks could be provided by other types of institutions ?

Suzanne
Go back to MoreBeta's post. Look at the section about international trade. What other institutions could manage the huge amount of cross border financing that goes on a daily basis. According to the ICC's 2014 Trade Register Report global export volumes for 2012-2013 were cUSD18.5trillion (USD18,500,000,000,000). The ICC state that "the majority of Trade and Export Finance is provided by the banking sector, typically the leading global financial institutions involved in international banking activity."

Who is going to step in an provide trillions of dollars of Trade and Export financing annually.

You may be knowledgable about the banking sector but there are a lot of people I have spoken to that only think of banks as either current account and mortgage providers or vampire squids trying to sell weather derivatives or cheese futures to grannies (or trying to sell their granny ).
p.s.
Both weather derivatives and cheese futures do exist!

?
It's entirely possible that we will come up with better ways of doing things in the future, the fact that there are no institutions currently able to take over the functions of the bank is no guide to what may arise in the future.
None of us can know how things will pan out, things will happen that we can neither envision nor forsee.

economies and societies / cultures are complex systems and as such inherently unpredictable ?