Secured Loans and Risky Assets in a Monetary Economy

We study the implication of secured credit with a default option for monetary equilibrium. The intermediary structure has the feature of costly state verification, with the monitoring cost interpreted as the cost of foreclosing assets once a default occurs. Without monitoring costs, uncertainty in asset payoffs does not matter for allocation. The asset price can exhibit a liquidity premium because more assets as collateral raises the borrower's credit limit. When there are monitoring costs, the asset's liquidity premium is strictly positive because pledging more assets reduces the default probability and thus the chance to incur monitoring costs. Under some circumstances, increased risk to dividends of the pledged asset may decrease the marginal borrowing cost to such an extent that bank lending rises, and higher default rates are accompanied by larger aggregate liquidity.