Yep, cue the "free market" folks celebrating poorly-informed transactions between VCs dumping these companies on construction workers investing to try to fight inflation enough to send their kids to college.
Why should you putting your money in a savings account ensure that you are protected from inflation? The whole point of an economy is for money to move and be invested, not hoarded by a dragon sleeping on a pile of gold coins.
Under fractional reserve banking, savings account deposits are lent out, which hopefully does result in productive investment
As I understand it, western retail banks that take deposits are fractional reserve banks, and have to be if they pay interest on deposits; after all, banks don't generate revenue from just looking after your money (unless they charge you for it, perhaps in the form of a negative interest rate)
They are indeed lent out, but mostly in very safe, boring investments, that don't really generate economic activity (mortgages). This is by design, as we generally don't want banks going pear-shaped, and taking people's savings with them!
If your money is used to generate meaningful economic activity, that means you're investing it into something like stocks (Which anyone can do by opening a Schwab, or a Vanguard, or a whomever account) - which will beat inflation, but on the short-and-medium term, are not a safe investment.
You're substantially right, of course, but to play devil's advocate:
1) the negative real central bank interest rates are a recent anomaly in my country, and above-inflation deposit interest was easy to find before that
2) mortgage lending should indirectly generate meaningful economic activity, in the form of building construction and maintenance
3) buying stocks on the secondary market also only indirectly generates meaningful economic activity - all it does directly is take stocks out of the seller's hands, replacing it with cash - presumably, this causes a chain of trades that lead to the primary market (or possibly to a mortgage)
There were major banking panics in the US in 1873, 1884, 1890, 1893, 1899, 1901, 1907 & 1908. All while the US was on a hard gold standard with weak central banks.
That’s of course without considering any of the pre and during depression era panics, where there was a quasi gold standard.
Savings can either be punished by inflation or risk. That’s an immutable financial fact. The only time you aren’t being punished for savings is if you exist in an economy where money can’t be put to productive use and is thus deflationary. Sometimes that’s good for savers but generally it means you are experiencing bad stagnation more broadly in the economy.
Double whammy of screwing poor people with monetary policy.