> banks can be limited to originating loans on 100% security of material personal property such as crops, livestock, cheese, gold, lumber, steel
The problem isn't getting loans on one's crops. It's transferring the price risk to someone better able to bear it.
Farmers want a guaranteed profit when they plant. Loans don't address that. Futures do. (It's why they were invented, in the 17th century, by the Dutch and Japanese.) The only real alternative is government guarantees. Those bring their own host of problems.
futures don't guarantee a profit, only a price. it's up to the farmer to decide whether the price is worth the planting (regardless of profit). and the pricing function only works well in an uncorrupt market.
the problem isn't the existence of the futures markets, but the same kind of over-consolidation that corrupts every laissez faire market, making them inefficient and brittle in the long-run. if regulation encouraged primarily mid-sized firms, rather than a few large ones, we'd have better informed and more efficient markets, albeit less lucrative since the firms wouldn't have undue (read: corrupting) influence.
note that insurance is another alternative to futures or gov guarantees, though i'd question the need to externalize risk, which manifests a critical market-shaping signal.
You mean growth dependence. When you are forced to grow every year and you can't grow by getting new customers you must steal existing customers from other companies by acquiring them.
'growth dependence' is just a symptom of greed, which is also the root driver of over-consolidation/corruption in markets. that's why a thoughtful regulatory stance is essential to high-functioning markets (e.g., anti-trust, not price controls), rather than the slapdash shit we have now, where parts of markets are highly over-regulated to ensure regulatory capture, while other parts are highly under-regulated to externalize risk.
The problem isn't getting loans on one's crops. It's transferring the price risk to someone better able to bear it.
Farmers want a guaranteed profit when they plant. Loans don't address that. Futures do. (It's why they were invented, in the 17th century, by the Dutch and Japanese.) The only real alternative is government guarantees. Those bring their own host of problems.