In a recent paper, Alessandro Barattieri, Dalibor Stevanovic, and I document a rising trend in the fraction of financial claims which have direct counterparts in the financial sector (rather than the non-financial sector, which includes traditional borrowers such as firms, households and governments). We estimate that, up until the 1970s, close to 100% of financial assets had direct non-financial counterparts; today these traditional claims represent a mere 70% of financial assets, while the rest represent loans between financial institutions. We point out that this trend roughly coincides with the declining impact of monetary policy shocks, and propose a model that links these two trends.