Yes, if you are America’s Most Wanted small time hood and you need money for dinner and some ammo, go to the bank and get some. But what if you’re a bank? Where do you go? If you could get your bank in a small room and ask “Why did you steal my Grandma’s house that she lived in for twenty three years and I used to go swing in the backyard?” What would they say? Because she had one.
Would you stoop down to pick up a penny off the sidewalk? When you vacuum out your car do you pick up the little pennies, nickels, and quarters down between the seats? Do you keep all your pennies in a little jar by your cupboard? Do you really need all those 386 pennies you have securely stored away? Do you look at your penny jar every morning and try to figure out where else you can look to get some more pennies? When you pick up a penny off the sidewalk, do you look around and ask, “Hey, did someone drop a penny? I have it!”
If you have $59Tn in assets and 1,100,000 mortgages and are processing so many payments per day you need a computer to keep track of the money, and one payment comes up missing that day and you only have 1,099,999 payments to process that day, what would you do? Ask the government for some money to make up for your cash flow problem?