Grand River Transit

[ijmorlan]

Yes. Also, “banks” do not “print” money; only the Bank of Canada (in Canada) does. Regular banks can only lend out deposits. 

"Printing money" isn't a firmly defined economics terms, so I can't say you're right or wrong as it depends on what exactly you mean. But through fractional reserve banking we do consider other banks to create money, see https://www.managementstudyguide.com/how...-money.htm .

There's multiple formal definitions of the money supply, see M0, MB, M1, etc at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_supp...rve_System . Some of them would only measure money created by the central bank, others measure money created by commercial banks.

Yes, they do create it in a sense; but they don’t create it out of nowhere. They lend money that was deposited with them, which has the effect of allowing 2 people to consider themselves to have the money: the depositor, and the borrower. In fact, they can’t even lend all their deposits, thanks to the cash reserve ratio. The money lent by a bank is limited by the money they have available, just as the money you can lend a friend to pay a restaurant bill is limited by your cash on hand. Anybody could set themselves up as a bank, by offering to pay interest on deposits and also offering to loan money; but long experience has taught us that this activity must be regulated quite strictly, so in practice only organizations of significant size can actually do so (legally).

By contrast, the only thing preventing the Bank of Canada from buying every current real estate listing in the country for double its current asking price, and also offering to buy every Government of Canada bond in existence for face value, while simultaneously funding every transit project ever proposed, is that doing so would be a grossly irresponsible exercise of the Bank’s power to create money out of nowhere.