Keith Evans
1 min readAug 27, 2021

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There is no "money multiplier" in bank lending. Banks create accounts, not money, when they make loans. Those are balanced out by the borrower's agreement to repay listed as an asset. If the bank finds itself short on reserves to balance its loans it must borrow them at the Fed overnight rate from those who have excess reserves to cover interbank transfers.

As loans are paid off both the borrower's contracts and the reserves are balanced to zero. This means that the bank must obtain "real" money from the borrowers to enable its profit (interest) and that money can only be created by the deficit spending of congress. This can be masked by constantly increasing GDP, rolling over private debt, but any hiccup in the system will result in defaults, making the system fragile and prone to bubbles and busts without sufficient interjection of new dollars into the economy.

Without the ability to respond to such hiccups in the business cycle via proper funding of safety nets the supply chains supporting the entire system fail rapidly and recessions/depressions follow quickly. (All of the last seven such events were preceded by contractions in the deficit spending of congress.) Also, the economy and the population cannot grow with a static money supply and your example of winners and losers becomes reality.

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Keith Evans
Keith Evans

Written by Keith Evans

Meandering to a different drummer.

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