But as long a you have the capital to issue a lot of independent 5 % non-payment risk loans, you can get away with simply discounting it 5 %.

The salient point here is that you only get to do that with idiosyncratic risk, because systemic risk is, by its nature, not independent. This is why properly run industrial societies use government back-stops to ensure that not everyone is unemployed and broke at the same time. Because the government, as the only entity which is definitionally solvent, is the only entity which can serve as a backstop against systemic risk.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.