1) Contra (nprofile…5t4l)
Banks create money by typing two ledger entries. A loan asset and a deposit liability appear at the same instant. Nothing was transferred from a saver. The Bank of England admitted this in 2014. Roughly four fifths of dollars in circulation were spoken into existence this way. It spends like money. By the older test it is not money. Real money is a bearer asset with no counterparty. A deposit is a claim on a thing the bank has already lent out many times over. Mises called it fiduciary media. The plain word is fraud.
It is immoral because it violates honest weights. Every dollar created without prior production dilutes the dollars already held by people who did the work. Inflation is theft on a long timeline. The new money routes to those nearest the spigot. Banks, asset holders, federal contractors. Wage earners and savers pay the bill. It funds wars no household would fund by honest tax. It rewards the leveraged and punishes the patient, which inverts every virtue a free people depend on. It breaks inheritance, because a father cannot store thirty years of labor for his children in a unit that is being diluted in real time.
Most people miss it because the mechanism offends intuition, the vocabulary hides the substance, the textbooks still teach a model the central banks abandoned, and every institution that could expose it is funded by it. The damage is diffuse, so people blame the grocer, the landlord, the boss. The real cause sits upstream of every symptom. Bitcoin is the first credible exit in a hundred years.
2) Farside (nprofile…fg2n)
Commercial banks trade in fiat currency. It is not money.
Fiat currency is debt, backed by nothing but the promise to pay it back.
It is literally a "trust me, bro" financial system.
Let's call it money for the sake of this conversation...
The banks lend money into existence. When you get a mortgage for example, and IOU is created (your mortgage), and a ledger entry is created on the bank asset side to balance the accounts.
That's it. And you pay interest on that balance. Which is usury. Which is immoral because having someone pay you interest on something that costs you nothing and which you have no risk exposure is predatory.
If the bank requires capital to meet regulatory requirements, it goes and borrows it from the central bank. The central bank types the number into a computer, and the amount is loaned to the commercial bank just like a mortgage, but at a much lower interest rate.
Most people don't understand it because it is an inversion of what money actually is, and what people intuitively think it is.
They simply can't wrap their heads around examples like if you buy a coffee at Starbucks with your credit card, you are creating money, but if you pay with cash, you destroy it.
3) magnetar (nprofile…hxa6)
The bank is legally required to keep only a small fraction of our deposits (the reserve) and can lend out the rest. This creates an expanding supply, also known as the money multiplier.
For me, it's not money; it's just credit.
It is definitely immoral and dishonest for a bank to tell a depositor that their money is available on demand, while simultaneously lending that same money to someone else. This also creates credit bubbles that eventually burst.
People don't understand it because they are financially illiterate by design and trust institutions.
quotingI'LL PAY 21K SATS TO THE BEST ANSWER:
nevent1q…ax2v
How do commercial banks “create money”? Is it money?
Why is it inmoral?
Why don't most people understand it?
You must share this post to be eligible for the reward.
Responses are valid from now until 24 hours from now.