by David Stockman, International Man:

Oh, puleese!

Ben Bernanke got the Nobel Prize for his early 1980s work on, well, why banks exist!

That’s right. What all students of banking knew 100 years ago—-that banks are inherently risky because they lend long and borrow short—got gussied up into a fancy theory of “maturity transformation”, and a further claim that the severity of the Great Depression was owing to the failure of maturity transformation in the private banking market.