> The entire US banking and financial system relies on NOT delivering or owning the underlying (fractional reserve banking, federal reserve printing money out o

> The entire US banking and financial system relies on NOT delivering or owning the underlying (fractional reserve banking, federal reserve printing money out of thin air This is sadly a very common misunderstanding of how money is created inside the financial system, even by professional economists and financial advisers. In reality money is not valued at parity with some physical material but as a simple act of accounting [0,1,2,3,4]. Historically a currency (subset) has been pegged against rare minerals as a method of insurance against state or exchange rate instability, the flip side is that this restricts state spending and economic growth -- a growing economy needs a growing stock of currency to service loans and avoid debt driven deflation, as in e.g. the great depression [5,6,7]. This is why gold/silver standards are always episodic in world history [8]. Even in the fien-de-secle gold standard era the majority of currency in circulation had its origin in endogenous bank lending [9]. The typical stability and viability of a currency is from the fact that it can be used to procure real goods in the wider market, which in turn is because money contracts are legally enforced via social power relations, e.g. by a local government with the power make and enforce such rules. Incidentally this is why cryptocurrencies act as an investment asset and not as a currency, it lacks the enforcement component and it appreciates in value, which is never what you want for a currency [10]. [0] Bank of England, Money Creation in the Modern Economy https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/quarterly-bulletin/2014/q1/money-creation-in-the-modern-economy https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/quarterly-bulletin/2014/q1/m... [1] Deutsche Bundesbank, The role of banks, non- banks and the central­ bank in the money creation process https://www.bundesbank.de/resource/blob/654284/df66c4444d065a7f519e2ab0c476df58/mL/2017-04-money-creation-process-data.pdf https://www.bundesbank.de/resource/blob/654284/df66c4444d065... [2] Richard A. Werner, A lost century in economics: Three theories of banking and the conclusive evidence https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1057521915001477 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S105752191... [3] Augusto Graziani, The Monetary Theory of Production https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/monetary-theory-of-production/A813BE586E79CDF0DE7C3D930DBF632F https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/monetary-theory-of-prod... [4] Basil J. Moore, Horizontalists and Verticalists https://www.cambridge.org/sc/universitypress/subjects/economics/economics-general-interest/horizontalists-and-verticalists-macroeconomics-credit-money https://www.cambridge.org/sc/universitypress/subjects/econom... [5] Scientific Origin, What Was the Gold Standard, How It Worked, and Why It Ended https://scientificorigin.com/the-gold-standard-what-it-was-how-it-worked-and-why-it-ended https://scientificorigin.com/the-gold-standard-what-it-was-h... [6] Irving Fisher, The Debt Deflation Theory of Great Depressions https://www.jstor.org/stable/1907327 https://www.jstor.org/stable/1907327 [7] Hyman P. Minsky, The Debt Deflation Theory of Great Depressions https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/232609677.pdf https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/232609677.pdf [8] Marc Lavoie, Endogenous Money: Accomodationist https://www.researchgate.net/publication/287788671_Endogenous_money_Accommodationist https://www.researchgate.net/publication/287788671_Endogenou... [9] David Graeber, DEBT: The First 5000 Years https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5,000_Years https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5,000_Years [10] Wikipedia, Silvio Gesell https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silvio_Gesell https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silvio_Gesell Apologies for the lengthy response, it's a personal pet peeve.