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50 Wake Forest L. Rev. 643 (2015)
Infinite Financial Intermediation

handle is hein.journals/wflr50 and id is 673 raw text is: INFINITE FINANCIAL INTERMEDIATION Tom C.W. Lin* INTRODUCTION No financial institution is an island, entire of itself.1 Intermediation is a fundamental fact of finance.2 Investment banks underwrite stock offerings for companies. Commercial banks safeguard the savings of workers. Fund managers invest the pensions of retirees. Exchanges match orders of buyers and sellers. Brokers facilitate trades of investors. Credit card companies advance funds to consumers. Collectively, these and other intermediaries form the fabric of modern finance. Yet despite all these financial links, entrepreneurs and innovators continue to endeavor toward the possibilities of fundamentally disrupting and disintermediating these existential financial ties, breaking apart from the financial mainland, and building new financial islands.3 This Article is about those financial links and those disengaging endeavors, the ties that thread the fabric of modern finance and the efforts to tear those threads asunder-the truths about financial * Associate Professor of Law, Temple University Beasley School of Law. Many thanks to Larry Cunningham, Onnig Dombalagian, Patricia McCoy, Kathryn Judge, Alan Palmiter, Andrew Verstein, Harwell Wells, and participants at the 2015 Wake Forest Law Review Spring Symposium for helpful comments and exchanges. Additionally, I am grateful to Thomas Helbig for his extraordinary research assistance. 1. This sentence paraphrases the poet John Donne's famous line about the linked nature of humanity. See JOHN DONNE, DEVOTIONS UPON EMERGENT OCCASIONS: TOGETHER WITH DEATH'S DUEL 152 (2008) (No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.). 2. See Gary Gorton & Andrew Winton, Financial Intermediation, in 1 CORPORATE FINANCE 433 (George M. Constantinides et al. eds., 2003), http://williamfang.weebly.com/uploads/9/1/3/4/9134217/handbookof-the-econo mics of financevolumela.pdf (Financial intermediation is a pervasive feature of all of the world's economies.). 3. See BRETT KING, BANK 3.0: WHY BANKING Is No LONGER SOMEWHERE You GO BUT SOMETHING YOU Do 14-20 (2013) (discussing the complete reboot of the banking industry); BRETT KING, BREAKING BANKS: THE INNOVATORS, ROGUES, AND STRATEGISTS REBOOTING BANKING, at xv-xvii (2014); JONATHAN MCMILLAN, THE END OF BANKING: MONEY, CREDIT, AND THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION 113-34 (2014); PAUL VIGNA & MICHAEL J. CASEY, THE AGE OF CRYPTOCURRENCY: How BITCOIN AND DIGITAL MONEY ARE CHALLENGING THE GLOBAL ECONOMIC ORDER 5-14 (2015). 643

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