with your anxieties but until you can literally see those spreadsheets, I don't think it's ever going to go away. Maybe you can get an internship at the Fed or something and ask some of the operational guys there? I do recall there being an NPR recording from All Things Considered where they go to the NY Fed and talk to the operations guys and they explained ex nihlio operations first hand, etc. And so to quote from the great (greatest?) play on earth...Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5, lines 917-920: HORATIO O day and night, but this is wondrous strange! HAMLET And therefore as a stranger give it welcome. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. In my Roman tale, if the tax collector who was doing the taxes in the morning and the payroll in the afternoon ran out of coins in his bowl (think TTL) before payroll was done, he would #1 be embarrassed and hope word did not reach his superiors, #2 he would quickly travel back to his home compound and reach down into his 52,000 coin "TGA" jar and grab a few handfuls of coins and then quickly return to the shire and put them in the bowl and then complete the payroll. Today (with our IT) we could simply run a negative balance in the bowl (TTL) instead of traveling all over the shire to obtain coins from a jar (TGA) to then put in