And I sincerely believe, with you, that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies; and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.
Thomas Jefferson, 3rd US President, in a letter to John Taylor in 1816 [1].
The actual process of money creation takes place in commercial banks. As noted earlier, demand liabilities of commercial banks are money. … Confidence in these forms of money also seems to be tied in some way to the fact that assets exist on the books of the government and the banks equal to the amount of money outstanding, even though most of the assets themselves are no more than pieces of paper...
Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago; Nichols, Dorothy M (1961). Modern Money Mechanics; a workbook on deposits, currency and bank reserves.. p. 3. OCLC 510802. The 1992 revision of this booklet is available on wikisource
