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A bank deposit is a debt, right?



No, it's a deposit which you can withdraw at any time. Although some people argue that a bank deposit is technically a loan—from a legal perspective they might be characterised as a loan in some jurisdictions, from an economic perspective a deposit is cash and not a loan.


But then how do you get the multiplicative effect described in the article without any debt ??


You get a multiplicative effect because when banks lend they create new deposits (=new money) in the process. That doesn't mean that the deposits created in this way are debt. They are not, the deposits are money. The loan is debt. The loan is an asset in the bank's balance sheet, whereas the deposit is a liability.

They explain it in more detail here: https://www.core-econ.org/the-economy/book/text/10.html#108-...




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