Yes, because that's how our current system works. The government prints money whenever a bank wants to lend it out, regardless of whether additional wealth was created or not.

> Fractional reserve banking started before central banks

Sure, and in those past systems, individual banks printed money to lend out, regardless of whether additional wealth was created or not. But in our current system, only the government is allowed to do that. Not that that absolves the banks--see below.

> which people would accept as payment for goods and serviced because the bank was reputable.

Yes. But what does "reputable" mean? What people thought it meant, back in the days when banking was young, was that the bank only lent out wealth that some other depositor had put in. In other words, when you took out a loan from the bank, you believed you were borrowing actual wealth that someone else had made available, and you paid an extra fee (the interest on the loan) for the use of that wealth in some (hopefully) profitable enterprise. The bank, in turn, made a profit as a middleman or broker, hooking up people who had surplus wealth to invest with people who had business enterprises that needed wealth.

But then some banks got the bright idea that they could increase their profits by printing more notes than they actually had wealth on deposit, and relying on people's belief that they were "reputable" to get those notes accepted at par--i.e., at the same rate as if they were actually backed by real wealth. If we actually described things as they were, instead of using euphemisms like "fractional reserve banking", the proper name for this would be "fraud". But it also happens to work, as long as one doesn't call it by its right name. Although it does have the downside of creating periodic financial panics, whenever people actually figure out that there isn't enough wealth on deposit at the bank to back all of the notes in circulation, and then they start rushing to the bank to redeem their notes for actual wealth before everyone else does--in other words, a bank run. One of the reasons that banks prefer to have the government do the money printing is that it eliminates this failure mode (in exchange for other worse ones)--see below.

> Since most of our money is digital nowadays, it would be even easier than in the past: the major banks could get together and just agree to tick up someone's account by X amount when another bank requests it. No government required.

They "could" do that in the sense of it being physically possible, sure. But in fact they don't, because it's illegal. Instead, they got the government to create the Federal Reserve, which does the money printing and allows the banks to maintain plausible deniability. It also has the advantage that, unlike private banks, the government can force people to accept its notes as legal tender, which eliminates the possibility of a bank run in the usual sense (though it certainly does not eliminate financial panics and boom/bust cycles, as we are now all too aware). I'm certainly not saying the banks are blameless in all this; I'm just saying that their current method of transferring wealth to their own pockets requires the government as a middleman.

No they don't. Currency in circulation is but a fraction of the money supply.

>If we actually described things as they were, instead of using euphemisms like "fractional reserve banking", the proper name for this would be "fraud"

Only if you accept that any IOU (which is "backed" by nothing but a promise to repay) is "fraud".

>then they start rushing to the bank to redeem their notes for actual wealth before everyone else does--in other words, a bank run

During a bank run people are rushing to obtain notes from the bank, not redeem them. The bank then doesn't have enough cash to fulfill the redemption. You have it backwards.

>But in fact they don't, because it's illegal.

They do it everyday, in plain sight of MASSIVE amounts of regulation.

You are seriously confused about the banking system. Less time viewing conspiracy theories on YouTube, more time reading work by the people who design and use the system. Despite what your sources tell you, the system is transparent (albeit complicated).

You are interpreting "printing money" way too literally. See my other comments in parallel subthreads.

> Only if you accept that any IOU (which is "backed" by nothing but a promise to repay) is "fraud".

A bank doesn't give me an IOU when it gives me a loan; it gives me actual money. Nor does it give depositors IOUs; they can get actual money in exchange for their deposits any time.

> During a bank run people are rushing to obtain notes from the bank, not redeem them.

To obtain notes corresponding to the amount they had on deposit, yes.

> The bank then doesn't have enough cash to fulfill the redemption.

Aren't you contradicting yourself? You just said "redemption" had nothing to do with it.

> They do it everyday, in plain sight of MASSIVE amounts of regulation.

No, they do something that is equivalent to the government printing money, if you don't insist on a way too literal interpretation. See above.

What the banks do not do is create money outside the very precise rules set down by the regulations you refer to. They also don't create money that is not denominated in the government's fiat currency. So they don't do anything that is analogous to what private banks did before governments outlawed private currency.

First of all, I didn't say redemption "has nothing to do with it". I did use the word redemption, but in a completely different context than you.

To reiterate: people are trying to obtain dollars in a bank run, not get rid of them. They're trying to exchange their bank IOUs (chequing accounts), which are worthless if the bank collapses, for FRB IOUs, which will still have value.

>A bank doesn't give me an IOU when it gives me a loan; it gives me actual money. Nor does it give depositors IOUs; they can get actual money in exchange for their deposits any time.

Umm, a chequing account with deposits is a bank liability (IOU). And you can't get money in exchange for your deposit at any time, account dependent. Your chequing account? Sure. That's why you receive a negative rate on it net of fees.

Again, you don't even seem to have a grasp of day-to-day personal banking. Follow the balance sheet transactions for a loan, watch how the assets and liabilities move around. If you can't even do that, why are you arguing about this stuff?

I didn't use the word in any context except quoting you. Anyway, it seems like the problem here is that you are using words according to the Humpty Dumpty principle: they mean whatever you want them to mean. I can't follow your shifting meanings, so I'll just bow out here.

Actual money is an IOU. From the gov't to the holder of the piece of paper. It used to say so on every bill: "Will pay to the bearer on demand".

Yes, "used to say", before the government decided it would no longer pay specie (gold) for currency notes. So money used to be an IOU of a sort, but it isn't now. (And even when specie payments were being made, there was never enough gold to back all the notes in circulation, so the IOUs weren't all valid anyway. They worked because people didn't treat them as IOUs; they treated them as a valuable commodity in their own right. So I don't think money ever really functioned as an IOU. Now, of course, we have no choice but to treat it as a valuable commodity in its own right.)