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Comment by mgraczyk | Hacker News Reader

Reserve requirements haven't mattered in US banks for a long time. One way to think about it is that reserve requirements constrain bank behavior, but the optimal strategy for banks would be the same regardless of whether that requirement were removed.

The requirement was removed in the US in March 2020 but has been a formality for most banks for a long time.

https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/reservereq.htm

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Right; the hard limitation on money creation is that banks exist in order to earn profits for shareholders, and there is only a finite pool of profitable lending opportunities at any given time. With no reserve requirement a bank could theoretically create unlimited amounts of money but it would eventually go bankrupt as it would take massive losses on bad loans.

It's more complicated than that.

Even without laws requiring reserves, banks still want to hold some precautionary reserves to eg settle interbank transfers or to serve cash withdrawal requests.

But those precautionary reserves can be very small without causing much trouble. In Scotland in the 19th century they had about 2% gold reserves and where doing fine.

What's more important are equity cushions to take the blow of losses before the depositors do.

Scottish banks typically had about 30% equity cushions because that's what depositors demanded. (These days laws require about 8%. Depositors don't care much anymore, because government deposit insurance numbs them.)

Can you please explain this in further detail or provide a link?

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