The comparison being made in that article is sort of a weird one and is not really reflective of banks' true reserve ratios (nor is the ~100% M1/reserve deposit

The comparison being made in that article is sort of a weird one and is not really reflective of banks' true reserve ratios (nor is the ~100% M1/reserve deposits that they were excited about true any longer). On https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=o4OS https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=o4OS I've included updated source data from that article, and you can see that M1 has continued to grow while fed reserve balances have fallen, but neither was ever close to M2 (which includes things like savings accounts and small CDs). A better indication of banks' leverage is Total Equity to Total Assets, which is similar to the Basel Tier 1 capital ratio: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/EQTA https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/EQTA This has steadily gotten healthier over time overall as banks have tended to reduce their leverage over the last few decades.