ALB is right, it’s not about

ALB is right, it's not about empirical study, but perception. The claim that the banks whistle the money out of thin air can be countered that the capitalist who borrows the money is in fact the one doing the magic, since they are effectively handing the bank an IOU (which will be legally enforceable, and thus constitutes an asset to the bank).  The bank is then just validating and guaranteeing the IOU (so that not everyone who does business with the firm has to do due dilligence, the banks have done that for them).  This would agree with our perspective that the key economic indicator is not interest rates, but rate of profit.For Marx, interest rates have no natural rate, they are simply a subdivision of profit, and the only limit is the rate of profit itself (since if the banks take all the profit as interest, the capitalist has no incentive to play).  Obviously, banks also want to make the typical rate of profit on the capital they invest, so they need to turn it over frequently, and attract depositors to help them achieve those profit rates.  No matter how you shake it, their business depends on the difference between the interest rate they can charge borrowers and the interest they pay their lenders.Also of note is Marx' contention that Money Capital acquires a use value.  If, say, the rate of profit is 10% then £100 has a useful value of producing an income of £10 (and vice versa, say, the copyright income on a book can be sold as representing a capital sum imagined from its real income value).So, the IOU from a capitalist can be seen as a capitalisation of the repayment schedule (itself the subset of the whole income stream of the firm), the gross sum need never exist, likewise the bank doesn't have to cover the whole gross, just cover the actual payments made out by the capitalist to other firms, etc.  The bank must, though, notionally be able to cover the whole of the loan, hence its need to balance its books.TL;DR : controlling interest rats doesn't control the economy, interest is a dependent variable, like employment, of profitability, and that in turn depends upon the succesful turn-over and expansion of capital.  Banks don't create wealth, they simply charge for a service in co-ordinating transactions.