@engineer,
Smoke and mirrors. You're buying into the created illusion that loans are created from deposits. The last paragraph explains your misconception on the issue of deposits being used for loans because of how it appears on the books.
___________________________________________
International Review of Financial Analysis
Volume 36, December 2014, Pages 71-77
Abstract
Thanks to the recent banking crises interest has grown in banks and how they operate. In the past, the empirical and institutional market micro-structure of the operation of banks had not been a primary focus for investigations by researchers, which is why they are not well covered in the literature. One neglected detail is the banks' function as the creators and allocators of about 97% of the money supply (Werner, 1997, 2005), which has recently attracted attention . . .
One reason for the neglect of the institutional and operational details of banks in the research literature in the past decades is likely the fact that no law, statute or bank regulation explicitly grants banks the right (usually considered a sovereign prerogative) to create and allocate the money supply. As a result, many economists, finance researchers, lawyers, accountants, even bankers, let alone the general public, have not been aware of the role of banks as creators and allocators of the money supply.
. . . “Bank credit creation does not channel existing money to new uses. It newly creates money that did not exist beforehand and channels it to some use…. What makes this ‘creative accounting’ possible is the other function of banks as the settlement system of all non-cash transactions in the economy.
… Since banks work as the accountants of record – while the rest of the economy assumes they are honest accountants – it is possible for the banks to increase the money in the accounts of some of us (those who receive a loan), by simply altering the figures. Nobody else will notice, because agents cannot distinguish between money that had actually been saved and deposited and money that has been created ‘out of nothing’ by the bank”
While the balance sheet total is not affected by the granting and disbursement of the loan in the case of firms other than banks, the picture looks very different in the case of a bank. While the loan contract shows up as an increase in assets with all types of corporations, in the case of a bank the disbursement of the loan takes a different form from that of the other firms: it appears as a positive entry on the liability side of the balance sheet, as opposed to being a negative entry on the asset side, as in the case of non-banks. As a result, it does not counter-balance the increased gross assets. Instead, both assets and liabilities expand. The bank's balance sheet lengthens on both sides by the amount of the loan (see the empirical evidence in Werner, 2014a, 2014c). Thus it is clear that banks conduct their accounting operations differently from others, even differently from their near-relatives, the non-bank financial institutions.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1057521914001434
Tell me specifically what part of this you disagree with, and your reasons for disagreeing.
Also for your consideration:
So how is it that the borrower feels that the bank's obligation to make funds available are being met? (If indeed they are being met). This is done through the one, small but crucial accounting change that does take place on the liability side of the bank balance sheet in Step 2: the bank reduces its ‘account payable’ item by the loan amount, acting as if the money had been disbursed to the customer, and at the same time it presents the customer with a statement that identifies this same obligation of the bank to the borrower, but now simply re-classified as a ‘customer deposit’ of the borrower with the bank.
The bank, having ‘disbursed’ the loan, remains in a position where it still owes the money. In other words, the bank does not actually make any money available to the borrower: No transfer of funds from anywhere to the customer or indeed the customer's account takes place. There is no equal reduction in the balance of another account to defray the borrower. Instead, the bank simply re-classified its liabilities, changing the ‘accounts payable’ obligation arising from the bank loan contract to another liability category called ‘customer deposits’.
While the borrower is given the impression that the bank had transferred money from its capital, reserves or other accounts to the borrower's account (as indeed major theories of banking, the financial intermediation and fractional reserve theories, erroneously claim), in reality this is not the case. Neither the bank nor the customer deposited any money, nor were any funds from anywhere outside the bank utilized to make the deposit in the borrower's account. Indeed, there was no depositing of any funds.
