>>12122
Lets actually try to answer this from an economic perspective instead of throwing around memes. Steve Horrowitz, despite being Jewish, has excellent incites into this matter.
A bank has two goals:
1) Store your money and ensure it is safe. This is sort of just the side-job of banks.
2) Loan out that money on potentially successful business ventures (or just payable loans) with a predetermined amount of interest for various factors in order to pay employee wages, give you interest for keeping money with the bank, and generally just allowing them to run on an effective business model. This is the important part of banks and what allows them to work.
The system of banking used by virtually all banks today is called "fractional reserve banking" and it's not bad in its own right. The general idea is that the banks know approximately how much they have to loan out, and how much total is in their coffers in case someone asks for money. With this in mind, the bank might loan out more than it has to loan out as a fraction of its total savings. This allows the bank to engage in bigger business ventures/loans that it otherwise would be unable to do. It keeps track of all of this via "paper money" so to speak, though with the modern age it's all digital.
Fractional reserve banking is actually extremely useful as it allows a bank to fund multiple business ventures that could lead to greater profits, and greater products and quality of life for customers down the line. Ideally, the bank keeps a close eye on each business venture to make sure that they're doing well and to make sure they get their money back in 99% of situations. The citizens are happy to use paper currency knowing they can get its worth out at any time if they so desire.
The trick with fractional reserve banking is that it only works when projections for the future are good. If they're bad, banks don't invest as much and the system self-corrects. Unfortunately, sometimes banks ignore the market, and when it comes time for customers to demand their money, the bank plays dumb because it's absolutely bankrupt from lending out all of its money like dumbasses. This is where banks fail and merchants are hung. People lose their businesses, but balance is restored for the most part.
Now, some people began to say "gee, fractional reserve banking works great on a local scale. Lets do it on a national scale!" and so they did. Unfortunately, the issue with centralized authority is it sucks are managing regions and tries to streamline the system in order to maximize production (such as the invention of credit cards which are literally just instantaneous microloans without any or with very poor background checks). So all these malinvestments occur, and the bank has to increase the amount of currency in the air (printing money) to make the economy look better and keep business investments high. If they suddenly stop increasing, the banks are in really fucking deep shit and so are the nations.
So eventually the banks try to stealthily get off of an official value-based currency (the switch from gold to fiat) in order to have less responsibility, and continue on with their bullshit.
Eventually though, all those malinvestments come to bite them in the ass (the recession), and they demand government bailouts to keep them afloat (nevermind the thousands of government regulations that allow their bullshit and irresponsible practices). Eventually, the public loses trust in them (which is why all alternative currencies except bitcoin to date have been heavily persecuted by the government. Bitcoin would be too if its creator wasn't virtually anonymous), and "pulls out" their money anyways, causing a gigantic fucking collapse as it's realized that the banks were increasingly lending out more and more money than they had at higher and higher inflation rates.
Like Keynesian economics, central banking is great on paper and works great when you can keep pumping money into it, but the moment reality strikes, it falls flat on its face. AnCaps/Libertarians try to justify this by keeping the banks localized so disasters are localized. Meanwhile, leftists use banking as the prime example of the "failures of capitalism" nevermind the fact that they actually provide a useful function that highly benefits society when the banking leaders use it in moderation.