Keith Evans
1 min readApr 18, 2021

--

Banks do not create money. They create credit and never lend from deposits. The Fed requires that 100% of loans issued be covered by reserves and will loan banks any shortfall they have from its own position of trust, which extends to the US government via federal guarantees .

That credit allows interbank transfers that are necessary in a modern economy, but only actual dollars created by Congress can "net" retire that credit obligation without incurring an additional credit obligation. A growing GDP can mask this by "rolling over" bank credit, but any hiccup in the economy, or cutback in federal money creation, threatens defaults and a cascade disruption of supply chains as we saw in '08.

If our economy was halted for a snapshot in time of the overall distribution of dollars, all such bank credit creation would be negated by the debt obligations of the borrowers and the "net" money supply would always equal the national debt of the government. If Congress foolishly attempts to balance its spending to its revenue (a misnomer for the monopoly issuer of the US dollar) it leaves nothing in the private sector to reimburse for resources and labor it requires. That would deprive the private sector of a store of value for commerce and offer no net dollars to retire private sector debt.

--

--

Keith Evans
Keith Evans

Written by Keith Evans

Meandering to a different drummer.

Responses (1)