I've had meetings with a billionaire investor to buy out a bankrupt private bank a few years ago.

We've been in the secure data rooms of the banks to inspect their books and see all the non performing loans.

Banking is a shell game - it's total BS. They are all broken, corrupted and bankrupt - running on thin air and BS.

Let's say I put $1M in cash into an account, the bank will lend out $10M against it to their other customers, it's just a game of balancing a little bit of cash on hand and writing huge loans against it.

It's just a ledger game - a confidence trickster game.

Your credit card, car loan, mortgage, business loan etc - that money never existed - it is effectively your money in the first place.

They gauge your productivity and allocate you funds - credit card 10k limit - you get a pay rise you pay the card well, you send in salary slips - they check your credit rating they'll give you a 20k limit, but the money doesn't exist, it's your money - the bank doesn't have any actual money behind what they allocate you. It's hard to get a head around until you think of a ledger from their side.

You want to buy a house, or a car or start a business - they gauge their risk and allocate you cash in an account - but the cash doesn't come from anywhere - it's not like they have depositors that match the amount of money they are lending out.

Some small banks and credit unions and local well run banks - balance it more or less 1 to 1... but most of the big guys, your JPM, Barclays, Wells Fargo, HSBC etc. - not at all.... It's 10 or 20 to 1 - or more.

So you ask for a 50k personal loan to start a business - there is no cash there - they just dial up a ledger and plonk the numbers in your account and on the bank side of their balance sheet they call that 50k an asset because you owe it back to them- but it never existed in the first place.

All they have to do is balance the amount of loans they write against a 5-10% buffer of cash on hand and bingo - from $100M of depositor cash, they have $2B in loans on the books - cash dished out (mainly to their masonic friends)... so long as the loans don't fail all at once enmass they are fine....... even when they fail, they just park them and leave on the books as an asset..... a debt that is owed to the bank is effectively a bank asset.... whether the money ever shows up again is another matter....

Credit cards are even worse - they gather nice 10-20%pa interests, but they blow up all the time. They know there will be frauds and cards that get shredded to max balance and the card holder disappears, it's all part of the shell game - it's still an asset until they write it off - which they almost never do.....

When they get tight, the central bank writes out more cash for them and refinances them.

It's a BS game.

There's loads of videos on youtube about if it you care to dig about.

and you and me and everyone else sit there thinking that these banks have all this money in them - they ain't got a dime.

i went into a major bank in a financial center - think wall st. to make a withdrawl - for a business matter that needed urgent funding - i needed like 50k in a hurry.... it was easier to pull cash and move it immediately..... and the bank had on hand $75k - cash - that was it ! on a busy Thursday afternoon - that was all they had there.... the cashier took me into the back room to collect the funds and I saw the ledger and she was worried they'd run out of cash cos of my 'large' transaction...

incredible...