This is true! Sorry, I’m a bit of a nerd about this stuff. I was just making the point that, in accounting terms, the banks don’t invest money... they create an

This is true! Sorry, I’m a bit of a nerd about this stuff. I was just making the point that, in accounting terms, the banks don’t invest money... they create and destroy it! Loan creation goes hand in hand with deposit creation and is a “grossing up” of the bank’s balance sheet. When the bank grants a loan, it also creates a deposit. So whilst I know it’s nice to think of “my money at the bank”, the reality is that your “money at the bank” is actually an IOU/deposit/debt that the bank previously created (when they granted a loan) and will, at some point, be destroyed when you or someone else pays back loan capital. Reason being is that I somewhat take issue with economists of the Austrian school or “full reserve bankers” (eg author of OPs article) who fundamentally don’t understand what banks are and how they work. It’s incredible really, because if they took the time to write out the accounting journals for loan creation and destruction then they would, in a single moment, realise that much of what they advocate is in fact complete nonsense. Because, ultimately, banks don’t lend out base money... so they can’t possibly counterfeit it (as Mises claims). Banks also don’t have a special privilege to create “money”/IOUs - we can all do it and we do it all the time, It’s just that the bank’s money is widely accepted and ours is not.