politics

Yes - Bernstein stumbled into a contradiction of central banking.

The fed lends money to control some inflation levers (interest rates) as well as support the political economy of banking (allow financial firms to profit from the margin between fed rates and consumer rates). Lending money as opposed to just giving people money also facilitates, in theory, prioritisation of investments that will produce a greater rate of return.

Alternatively the US could dispense with bankers and centrally plan investment (in a much greater capacity - obviously things like the CHIPS Act are central planning to a degree).

I'm too lazy to watch the video for the context, but how money works is that it is exchanged for goods and services

Even if you don’t, the capitalists insist they know more than you because they took economics 101 in high school. They should be able to explain their system whether you understand it or not.

After looking it up, it sounds like the cash part is pretty much economy-neutral. Banks essentially buy cash. If they have $100,000 and an empty ATM, they can turn that into $90,000 and an ATM with $10,000 in it. The actual thumb-on-the-scale-of-the-economy doesn't happen there, and it wouldn't make sense to have it happen there -- banks would beg everyone to empty out the ATMs so they could refill them with fresh hondos.

Marx defines money in chapter 3 of capital. Here's an excerpt, better to read the whole thing.

These historical causes convert the separation of the money-name from the weight-name into an established habit with the community. Since the standard of money is on the one hand purely conventional, and must on the other hand find general acceptance, it is in the end regulated by law. A given weight of one of the precious metals, an ounce of gold, for instance, becomes officially divided into aliquot parts, with legally bestowed names, such as pound, dollar, &c. These aliquot parts, which thenceforth serve as units of money, are then subdivided into other aliquot parts with legal names, such as shilling, penny, &c. [10] But, both before and after these divisions are made, a definite weight of metal is the standard of metallic money. The sole alteration consists in the subdivision and denomination.

The prices, or quantities of gold, into which the values of commodities are ideally changed, are therefore now expressed in the names of coins, or in the legally valid names of the subdivisions of the gold standard. Hence, instead of saying: A quarter of wheat is worth an ounce of gold; we say, it is worth £3 17s. 10 1/2d. In this way commodities express by their prices how much they are worth, and money serves as money of account whenever it is a question of fixing the value of an article in its money-form. [11]

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch03.htm