> It is indeed wrong, but nobody here has made such a statement

Really? The very first comment I replied to was:

"banks at least tell you they are loaning your deposits out"

My response:

"Side not but that’s not really how banking works. Banks create deposits when they originate loans and separately look for the assets they need in order to satisfy any regulatory requirements and net flows of funds for inter bank settlements."

Your initial response:

"No, when you take a loan out of a bank, the bank doesn't "create deposits" that it loans to you. The bank loans you existing deposits"

Are you saying there's a distinction between "banks loan you existing deposits" and "banks lend out reserves"? They seem to be the same statement to me ...

> Now, a bank which has a high amount of capital can in practice issue more loans than a bank which has a low amount of capital. And one way of increasing the bank's capital (and thus improving the bank's ability to issue loans) is increasing the bank's reserves

Yeah that's one way they can do it. Those reserves would then almost always be swapped for bonds unless there's more money to be made by loaning them to other banks (which is how the central bank sets and defends the interest rate).

> So there's some kind of positive correlation between a bank's reserves and its ability to issue loans, right? You mentioned yourself that a bank has to have sufficient capital to survive short term liquidity events, and issuing a large amount of loans increases the probability of such events.

You could, if you wanted to, have a bank that capitalised entirely with reserves, but it's way more profitable to attract reserves, lend them out to other banks who have attracted less reserves, and buy bonds with said reserves. You can use the loans you made yesterday to another bank as collateral to borrow at the discount window, for example, if you find yourself in your own liquidity crunch.

So I'd say a more accurate statement is that there is a positive correlation between a bank's ability to attract reserve deposits and its profitability, both due to additional loan origination capacity and due to low capital costs. But reserves are only one piece of the puzzle.

I would say that reserves within a bank's capital mix are similar to tyres and car safety. Having bald tyres is really unsafe, and having better tyres improves your car's safety, but there are tonnes of other ways to drive safely and there's a point at which you're over spending on tyres that won't make any difference to the overall safety of the car (don't you just love car analogies?)

> The sources you've provided describe the "general case" of banks making loans as part of normal business proceedings.

Yes agreed.

> You're making the argument that the same mechanisms that enable the general case would equally apply to the extreme case.

Not really, the part where I used "starting from scratch" as an example was to highlight that reserves increase profitability of a bank and that while, due to regulation, banks can't just start with "nothing" (they need some way to satisfy their liqudity requirements, aka capital), but the system we end up with a little while after "starting from scratch" is very similar to what we have now. The crux of the matter is that reserves increase profitability. It is almost certainly the case that a bank that always has to borrow to satisfy all liquidity requirements will go broke, so regulators don't let that happen, but also a bank which over capitlises reserves relative to loan origination (Xinja being the extreme example of that) will also fail.

The genesis of this thread was the notion that banks "lend out deposits", that's what I'm arguing against.

> but you don't believe it might prevent yacht-buying and aeroplane-buying before the loss of banking license occurs?

Well, actually probably not! Like, they couldn't do it twice, but banks are allowed to have negative reserve balances for a time. If they had been found to be fraudulent then they should go to jail (would they though?) but on the actual day that this happened, the yacht transaction would probably actually succeed. Of course, if the owner of the yacht could be traced back to the fraud committed as a willing participant then that yacht could well be siezed as part of the estate and so on, proceeds of crime and whatnot.

But if some dude really flipped and just typed in the numbers, they could do it, but it would wind up very quickly.

However there are not-too-dissimilar tactics used in banks such as appraisal fraud and liars loans. If you listen to Bill Black's recipe for control fraud it's more or less what you're describing[0], just a little slower and a little more "book cookey".

His book "The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One" has many examples of control fraud. Sure it's a little more deceptive than just opening a spreadsheet and typing in the numbers, but they're totally faking capital levels in order to obtain liquidity to satisfy net flows of funds, resulting in tremendous short term profits and eventual collapse.

> The reason why I'm bringing up this extreme case is to demonstrate that clearly there is some connection between the bank's... I'm going to say capital... and its ability to issue loans. This connection also exists in less extreme cases, but it's easier for me to demonstrate with this extreme example.

Right so what you could say is there's definitely a "credit limit". If you typed in $9,999,999,999,999 into the spreadsheet and then tried to spend it all externally (meaning that none of the people you were buying from had accounts at the same bank, OR you tried to withdraw all that money as notes and coins) then that would set off some sort of warning: either you'd be trying to borrow too much too quickly from too many people, or your account would be so negative overnight that the Fed would give you a call and be like "ummmm ... no". This is pretty similar to what things might look like if you or I tried to spend too much too quickly on our AMEX card.

But "having reserve deposits" is not a pre-requisite for originating a loan. Banks can (and do!) get away with somewhat subtler forms of control fraud over a period of time that is not really that long (2 - 3 years, say) during which time executives can stash an enormous amount of cash and just leave the mess for the regulators to clean up.

There certainly are people who advocate for 100% reserve banking and an end to private credit such as Positive Money[1] but their policies are not very practical and (as per the lecture series I linked to earlier) some private credit creation is probably a good thing to have in an economy. The problem is how dominant the financial system itself (which is, ultimately, just a record keeping system) has become in terms of GDP. We need to make finance boring again!

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClfBxWPkBKU

[1] https://positivemoney.org it's worth noting that while I do, in general, not agree with much of what PM has to say my understanding is that they were actually quite instrumental in lobbying to get the BoE to produce the paper to which I originally linked. In their case they were motivated to "expose the reality" and shock everyone into demanding 100% reserve banking but I don't think anyone was actually all that shocked by it, except David Graeber who wrote about it https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/18/truth-... and, as luck would have it, was where I first learned about MMT in the comments section when someone linked to this youtube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTZGU9s0idM