[msandford]

> The capital that cannot be withdrawn is what I refer to as "true capital", as all of the other value exists solely as reflection of the true capital.

What? How does that have any bearing on reality? The values of mortgages a bank has on its books aren't a reflection of how much reserves it has, it's a reflection of the dollar values attached to the loans.

How many loans a bank can write in a month is of course dependent upon how much money the bank has sitting around in excess of the reserves it is required to keep. But again, that doesn't dictate the dollar values on the loans. Those were fixed at signing and in the absence of problems, get smaller at a predictable rate. What do reserves have to do with the loan equations?

[jsprogrammer]

You said that the bank could just withdraw the money and use it for something else. The bank cannot just withdraw money. An individual or organization could withdraw from an account they have at the bank, but the bank itself cannot withdraw any of its capital (which is the only way the analogy we were discussing makes sense) if it has any outstanding loans. The reason the bank cannot do this is laid out in my previous comment.