Deposits are a public/private partnership which create generally usable money out of risky banking activities.

The model we are taught as children is, like most models, useful but inaccurate. “You take this $20 bill to a bank and deposit it. They will keep it safe for you, and then give you $20 back in the future, plus a little extra for having the use of it in the meanwhile. We call that interest.”

Let’s start dissecting this transaction. You don’t deposit a $20 bill. You purchase a $20 deposit, coincidentally using a piece of paper with the same number on it. The deposit is a liability (a debt) of the bank to you. The bill which you gave the bank in return for the deposit is now theirs, the same as if you had bought a cup of coffee from Starbucks. On their balance sheet, it is now an asset.

But the fact remains: neither Musk's extraordinary efforts to cut waste and fraud, nor Trump's efforts to cut trade deficits and boost revenues by imposing tariffs, and certainly not the plan to cut $1.5 trillion in spending while authorizing $4 trillion in new borrowing currently winding its way through the various committees in the US House of Representatives, are likely to materially affect the eventual outcome when financial panic finally arrives.

Lysander Spooner (January 19, 1808 — May 14, 1887) was an American abolitionist, entrepreneur, lawyer, essayist, natural rights legal theorist, pamphletist, political philosopher, and writer often associated with the Boston anarchist tradition.

Spooner's writings include the abolitionist book The Unconstitutionality of Slavery