* Big banks prefer to lend to big companies because it's more profitable to make one $100M loan than 1,000 $100k loans.
* Banks also prefer to lend for non-productive consumption like mortgages because loans backed by hard assets are less risky than productive loans to small businesses, despite those loans not contributing to growing the economy (but creating money out of thin air to flood the market with mortgages does increase housing prices...).
One way to solve this problem is to break up the big banks and incentivize small regional banks to lend to productive small businesses. Worse for the bankers but better for the economy. Incidentally, this is exactly China's strategy, but as long as big banks are paying politicians millions for luncheon talks, it's unlikely to happen here.
Your second point is totally correct, but it is exacerbated as a result of (broadly good) government policy. A bank wouldn’t mind making uncollateralised loans any more than a mortgage, although it might charge more interest for the risk. However the government penalises banks based on (approximately) the sum of their risk weighted assets [0]. Here mortgages, as collateralised loans, are greatly incentivised over uncollateralised loans to business.
It’s hard to say if the situation would be worse without it, it’s possible we might have more risky business loans leading to growth, but also more likely we could see a serious global financial crisis.
[0] I am simplifying here slightly but you can see how the US ranks major banks here, higher is worse from the banks point of view https://www.fsb.org/uploads/P261124.pdf
This is a straight up giveaway to friends.
Even dictators in other countries don't make it so obvious because they're worried their populations would revolt, which says a lot about the American voter today.
This would significantly impact its valuation to outside investors.