Wealth & Money Quote by John Kenneth Galbraith

Banking, Galbraith suggests, survives partly because it offends common sense. The line lands like a polite insult: money feels foundational, even moral, so the idea that it can be conjured through bookkeeping entries is not just surprising but psychologically unacceptable. “Repelled” is the tell. He’s not claiming the mechanism is complicated; he’s arguing that our minds resist it because it exposes how much of the economy rests on trust, law, and institutional authority rather than tangible stuff.

The specific intent is demystification with a sting. Galbraith, a public-facing economist with a satirist’s timing, is puncturing the folk story that banks are mere vaults lending out pre-existing savings. In modern credit systems, banks create deposits when they make loans; money expands via balance sheets, not printing presses. The simplicity is precisely what makes it politically radioactive: if money is made this way, then power flows to whoever gets to decide which borrowers are “creditworthy,” and crises look less like natural disasters and more like man-made design failures.

The subtext is a critique of reverence. Bankers and policymakers benefit from treating money as arcane, because arcana discourages democratic scrutiny. Galbraith wrote in an era shaped by the Great Depression, postwar financial management, and recurring bouts of inflation and instability. Against that backdrop, the quote reads as a warning: the comforting myth is not that banks can’t create money; it’s that they can, and we’ve agreed to let them do it with minimal visibility until it all goes wrong.