A bank simply advances bank credit created on its books. This credit becomes a deposit in the account of the borrower, who can write checks on it. The checks then get deposited in other banks and trade in the economy as what we all know as "money."
A bank can create as much money on its books as it can find creditworthy borrowers for, up to the limit of its capital requirement. The hitch comes when the checks drawn on these loans-turned-deposits are cleared, usually through the Federal Reserve. A bank with a 10% reserve requirement must keep 10% of its deposits either as "vault cash" or in a reserve account at the Fed, and when checks are cleared by the Fed, it is through this account. The effect is to make the bank short of reserves, which it can try to replenish by attracting back the customers of the bank where the credit was deposited. But as was explained by the Winterspeak blogging team:
"If bank A [the lending bank] fails to [attract new depositors], then it simply borrows the reserves it needs overnight from . . . bank B [the bank where the reserves wound up]. The overnight lending market is designed to do exactly this. Bank B, in this case, happens to have exactly the quantity of reserves bank A needs, and since reserves earn no interest, is happy to lend to bank A at the federal funds rate, which is the overnight interbank lending rate."
In effect, a bank can create money on its books, lend the money at interest (today about 4.7% on a fixed rate mortgage), then clear the outgoing check by borrowing back the money it just created, at a cost to the bank of only the very low fed funds rate (now .2%). The bank creates bank credit, lends it at 4.7%, then borrows it back at .2% to clear the outgoing checks, collecting 4.5% interest as its profit. The credit the bank has lent is not an asset it has labored to earn but is simply "the full faith and credit of the United States" the credit of the people collectively. Yet the bank is allowed to pocket a hefty interest spread on this credit-generating scheme; and that is assuming it lends at all, something that is happening less and less these days, since bankers find it safer and more lucrative to use their nearly interest-free credit lines to invest in risk-free government bonds at taxpayers' expense, engage in speculation, or pay themselves sizeable bonuses.
Avoiding Another Lehman-style Credit Collapse
The reason banks are highly dependent on loans from each other, then, is that they need these low-cost loans to keep the credit shell game going. This is particularly true for large Wall Street banks. Small banks get their funds mainly from customer deposits, and usually have more deposits than they can find creditworthy borrowers for. Large banks, on the other hand, generally lack sufficient deposits to fund their main business -- dealing with large companies, governments, other financial institutions, and wealthy people. Most borrow the funds they need from other major lenders in the form of short term liabilities that must be continually rolled over.
That helps shed light on what really caused the credit crisis following the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008. The Lehman bankruptcy triggered a run on the money markets, causing interbank lending rates to soar. The London interbank lending rate (LIBOR) normally adheres closely to official interest rate expectations (meaning, in the U.S., the targeted fed funds rate); but after Lehman went bankrupt, the LIBOR rate for short-term loans shot up to around 5%. Since the cost of borrowing the money to cover their loans was too high for banks to turn a profit, lending abruptly came to a halt.
Interest rates on variable rate mortgages and big corporate deals tend to be based on LIBOR rates, which are moving up again now, although the fed funds rate has not changed. LIBOR rates are moving up due to tensions arising from the possibility that Europe's sovereign debt crisis could turn into another global banking crisis.
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