Your paper bank has a cash pile and a written record. A ledger is a record of money movements and amounts. A balance is the amount recorded in an account. These are not labels on particular notes.

Banks maintain deposits and make loans. A loan is money lent under an agreement to repay. In our small model, the bank lends cash tokens to a fictional borrower. The depositor’s recorded balance does not disappear when those tokens move.

The bank still owes the depositor that recorded amount. The borrower now owes the bank too. Keep both obligations beside the cash pile. Ignoring either record would make the model misleading.

Real banks are more complicated than this drawer game. They use account money and other sources of funding; they do not simply earmark one person’s bills for another. The discovery here is narrower: the same physical notes are not held in a named box, and a record is different from the cash currently visible.

A bank record raises another question: what protection applies to money in an account? In the United States, the FDIC is a government agency that insures eligible deposits at insured banks, up to limits.

Insurance here means protection for covered deposits if an insured bank fails. A failed bank cannot continue operating in the usual way. Protection has rules and limits; it is not a claim that banks can never fail.

A deposit account and an investment are different. Stocks are shares of ownership in a company. FDIC deposit insurance does not cover stocks or other non-deposit investments, even when bought through a bank.

The paper game does not demonstrate insurance. It helps you separate a cash pile, a balance record and a borrower’s debt. The reading adds a real boundary to the exploration: ask what is covered, at which institution and under which rules. Countries have different systems, so the US example is not a worldwide promise.