"When Alice made a loan to Bob, Bob got a deposit in their bank account but Alice never lost her deposit" You're arguing with a scenario I didn't give. As I sa

"When Alice made a loan to Bob, Bob got a deposit in their bank account but Alice never lost her deposit" You're arguing with a scenario I didn't give. As I said already: neither Alice nor Bob are banks, therefore when Alice lent Bob the money she no longer had it. She didn't retain an appearance of having the money in her account because there is no account - it's all just cash. It's a very simplified scenario designed to show why the argument about money supply and debt is false in the general case. "But those others they sell the good too also only have money if it was created via debt somehow. Not a single human bootstrapped with dollars." Of course they did! Banking is an evolved system that sits on top of physical money. It isn't the case that all money is bank issued fractional reserve debt and it never has been so. Most people and institutions do indeed control at least some "hard money", even if it's just in the form of cash, or these days cryptocurrency. In the west, we've come to rely more and more on fractional reserve accounts over time, but that doesn't change the correctness of the underlying argument - we aren't in a situation where paying debts off is impossible because there isn't enough money. "At the inception of the loan, the total amount of money in the system was money owned by Alice2. When the debt was payed off, the total amount of money in the system was Alice1. While it is true that Bob ended up with a business, it is also true that the amount of money in the economy has shrunk." You seem to be having a hard time keeping the various layers of the system separate! The amount of money in my toy scenario didn't change at any point because, again, neither Alice nor Bob are banks. They are people. When Alice lent to Bob she didn't create money: she had zero money at that point.