After the Depression when people did "runs" on banks, withdrawing all of their funds only to find that the banks had loaned out all of the money, the US government made banks keep a percentage of their account balances in the Federal Reserve. Originally, the banks actually had to keep a percentage of their account balances at the fed. Now banks are allowed to do temporary barrow funds from the Fed (at the Fed rate). This is all based on banks accurately reporting their funds. Wells Fargo has found a way to hide money.
As an example, let's say you deposit $5000 into your Wells Fargo account. The deposit consisted of a $5000 check drawn on another Wells Fargo account. What Wells Fargo is doing is immediately removing the $5000 from the account upon which the check was written but not giving credit for the deposit until 24 hours later. The $5000 becomes "hidden" money as it is no longer in the original account but it has not been deposited into the other account. For 24 hours, this money is in neither account. Now imagine this across billions of accounts. This huge amount of money becomes "hidden" and will not be reported to the fed as part of Wells Fargo account structure requiring a matching reserve at the Fed.
If banks are allowed to get way with practices such as this, the US economy is in much greater trouble than billions of dollars in national debt.
