I agree, and why I was saying that plenty of people are willingly paying thousands of dollars per year for live events, whether sports, concerts, theatre, standup comedy, etc.

The specific events might be more or less likely to attract a ton of secondary ticket buyers at very high prices, but for something like this, where the season ticket waitlist is years long, there are plenty of people willingly buying tickets to the less competitive games to get a chance at a face value ticket to these types of top 5 matchups.

That’s true, too. Also, for a game like this, pretty much all season ticket holders want to go to the game, so they’re less likely to give up the tickets on secondary market sales.

Still, for this particular program, in this particular season, the season ticket holders need to have been paying at least $3000/season, if not more, for pretty much the last 5-10 years (including some mediocre seasons), in order to even get the tickets shown on the original image. So pretty much anyone sitting at the game either spent $1000+ for a single ticket or spent thousands for multiple tickets.

Very few people

A very small percentage of people still turns into a large number of people in a population large enough.

How many people in the US can afford to pay $10,000 per year on entertainment? Maybe anyone who makes more than $200k per year? That might be 5% of the population, or about 17 million Americans. Not all of them will be fans of college football, much less one of the two specific teams playing, but it’s still not that hard to find a few tens of thousands of humans with lots of disposable income and the means to make their way to a specific game.

It’s not always that simple. Warmer atmosphere also makes stronger wind, and the wind shear makes it harder for hurricanes to organize into strong cyclones. Traditionally, El Niño years make stronger Pacific cyclones but weaker Atlantic ones.

Being obese is just really fucking destructive to the body, so a drug that helps with that will have a lot of positive effects.

Water has the harshest withdrawal symptoms known to medical science.

So the question becomes, does the money get created when it is put in a deposit account balance, or when it gets spent outside the bank for the first time?

The textbook answer is that the money is created as soon as the deposit balance is created, not when the account holder spends it down enough to where the bank needs to borrow to maintain liquidity. It’s how the Fed counts M1, for example.

The bank’s need to actually run a viable business, and central bank regulations, prevents it from going nuts with this, but that’s beside the point of what I’m saying: a bank doesn’t need the central bank’s permission or approval to create money by extending loans. In the aggregate, central bank policy affects the way all the different banks do this, but the end result is that the banks can create a shitload more money than there are reserves (and the reserves don’t need to be physical currency, either, since they can just be balances in accounts with other financial institutions).

I can withdraw all I own and turn it into gold or pebbles if I like

You don’t turn it into anything. You spend it to buy something else. You can spend it without withdrawing any kind of physical representation of the currency, too, with just plain old electronic payment systems.

The borrower provides an asset (collateral) and the bank provides an asset (savings from third parties).

Plenty of loans are made unsecured, where the borrower doesn’t pledge the asset. The act of money creation through lending is the same regardless of whether it’s secured or unsecured loans. And even secured loans don’t change the underlying ownership and control of the collateral, unless a foreclosure happens.

That’s not how central banks work. You still need collateral, which you can’t pledge multiple times.

Yes, but the collateral can be the loans that they’ve extended, which, again, were created by creating a loan balance and a deposit balance. So they can extend a loan for $100, let the borrower spend $100, and then borrow against the original borrower’s loan balance.

No, it can’t be done infinitely, but I never claimed that it could be. I’m just saying that the process itself is entirely ephemeral, through written or electronic records alone.

Read my original comment again. I explicitly talk about banks borrowing to maintain liquidity. It’s an important limit on their ability to create money, and nobody said anything about infinite money supply.

But it doesn’t change the fact that the act of money creation is caused by a bank creating a loan, and the money comes into being without a single physical act of manufacturing: it happens on a computer, and before computers it happened on paper.

So without claiming that money was unlimited, I did point out that money itself is overwhelningly digital in the modern age. And the limits don’t come from any physical constraints.

Yes, the limit to commercial bank lending is creditworthiness and default risk (because the bank is left holding the bag when a borrower doesn’t repay), and the cost of maintaining liquidity (the bank can borrow against the loans it owns, but it may cost a higher interest rate than they’d earn on the cash they’ve lent out). This paper lays it out pretty clearly, and is basically the near unanimous view among macroeconomists.

Or, in some regulatory environments, banks are required to maintain a minimum fractional reserve, which limits the total amount of loans it can lend out with its underlying assets.

But the money is created when the loans are created, and destroyed when the loans are repaid. The other stuff behind the scenes to give the system stability is important, but doesn’t actually create or destroy money.

Not exactly. The central banks acting as a lender of last resort encourage the commercial banks to create money in this way, but be assured that the actual creation occurs whether the bank needs to borrow money or not. The definition of money supply looks to the balances in checking accounts, and creating and disbursing a loan increases the balance in a checking account (while simultaneously increasing the negative balance in a loan account, but loan balances don’t shrink the money supply), and as that money is spent it increases balances in someone else’s checking account.

It’s how all of it works. Money is just balances on double-entry bookkeeping, and the paper currency essentially is a piece of paper that the bearer of that paper is good for moving the balances in that ledger system.

And almost all of those ledgers are now digital.

We already have mostly digital currency.

Money is created when a bank creates a loan, by starting with nothing and then splitting that nothing into a credit in one account (the borrower’s checking account, usually) and a debit in another (the borrower’s loan balance). From there, most transactions are digital where an ACH transfer or similar results in some numbers being subtracted from one account and added to another.

Almost all of this happens on computers, and even before computers it just happened literally on a paper ledger, with paper checks.

You might ask, “wait where does the bank get its money from to be able to allow money to be withdrawn or transferred to another bank?” If the bank doesn’t have the liquidity to do so, it can always borrow money from other banks or the government, with the last resort in the United States being the federal reserve banks, who by the way also print all the paper currency. So having that backstop is important for regular banks to have the power to create money, but the actual creation of money happens digitally to begin with, regardless of whether the bank later needs to distribute paper bills or borrow from the federal reserve.