When a bank makes a loan, does it create money "from thin air"? Are banks merely intermediaries, where "if people are borrowing, other people must be lending"? I consider these sorts of questions less and less helpful. Let's just understand what a bank loan is, in terms of real resources and risk.

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... in fact, the seller would not accept my debt in exchange for the goods and services she supplies. If I wrote her a promise to perform for her some service of equal value in the future (which might include surrendering crisp dollar bills), she would not accept that promise as a means of payment. I circumvent her fear by writing to the bank precisely the promise that the vendor would not accept and having the bank "wrap" my promise beneath its own. The bank's job is not to "lend" anything in any meaningful sense. The bank is just a bunch of assholes with spreadsheets, it has nothing real that anyone wants to borrow. The bank's role is to transform questionable promises into sound promises. It is a kind of adapter of promises, or alternatively, a guarantor.

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but one thing should be absolutely clear. Under existing institutions, there is little coincidence in the roles of creditor from a real resource perspective and creditor from a risk perspective. Our banks are machines that permit vendors to surrender real resources in exchange for promises the risks of which they do not bear. The risks associated with those promises do not go away. They may be mitigated to some degree by diversification and pooling. They might be modest, in the counterfactual that banks were devoted to careful credit analysis. But these risks must be borne by someone. The function and (I would argue) purpose of a banking system is to sever the socially useful practice of production-and-exchange-for-promises from the individually costly requirement of assuming the risk that promises will be broken, in order to encourage the former. The essence of modern banking is a redistribution of costs and risks away from people who disproportionately surrender real resources in exchange for promises. Under the most positive spin, modern banking systems engineer an opaque subsidy to those who produce and surrender more real resources than they acquire and consume by externalizing and ultimately socializing the costs and risks of holding questionable claims.

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Banks are not financial intermediaries in any simple sense of the word. When they "make a loan", they serve as guarantors, not creditors. The borrower does not meaningfully become a debtor until the loan is spent. Only then do creditors emerge, but the role of creditor is bifurcated. The people to whom resources are owed are not the same as the people bearing the risk of nonperformance. The question of who actually bears the risk of nonperformance has grown difficult to answer, and concomitantly, incentives among bank decisionmakers for caution in creating that risk have weakened, especially relative to the benefits of cutting themselves in on some share of borrowers' protected expenditures. This bifurcation of the role of creditor also explains why creditors as a political class are relatively indifferent to the upside of a good economy but extremely intolerant of inflation. A good economy means better higher values and better performance on outstanding loans, but creditors who are owed resources but are absolved from risk do not care about the performance of the loans that have become their assets. Those fluctuations, like fluctuations of the stock market, are somebody else's problem or somebody else's gain. Protected claimants, people who are owed money by banks or the state (which is itself a bank), can only lose via inflation. They understandably work within the political system to oppose inflation, which would force them to bear some of the cost of the bad loans whose misexpenditures were, in aggregate, the source of much of their wealth.