The truth is out: money is just an IOU, and the banks are rolling in it:

What the Bank of England admitted this week is that none of this is really true. To quote from its own initial summary: “Rather than banks receiving deposits when households save and then lending them out, bank lending creates deposits” … “In normal times, the central bank does not fix the amount of money in circulation, nor is central bank money ‘multiplied up’ into more loans and deposits.” In other words, everything we know is not just wrong – it’s backwards. When banks make loans, they create money. The complexity and subtlety in our financial system is delightful and frightening all at the same time. Almost everything has multiple contributing factors that are impossible to isolate and subtle shifts in world view like this can have huge implications on decision making.