A few (2 billion?) dollars were actually created by JFK's government, but not since.

That would be... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Note There are no relevant countries that remain free from Govt Central Banks... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_bank https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_central_banks There are no countries fiat at all that are backed by Gold or any other resource, it's all 100% fiction, the convertibility ratio, at their issuance window, back into anything, is precisely zero... "From this point, the international monetary system was made of pure fiat money." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_standard Any "reserves" are no longer used to back their fiats literally, it's now more a trading, settlement, forex, and wargames thing... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_reserve Some like DPRK and others in the news are even getting into holding and trading cryptocurrency now.

ratio of capital to loans is the "reserve ratio", which was around 15% but years ago got reduced to 3% and from memory even lower

There are a number of points in systems various reserve ratios are applied. US Fed indeed just cut, and set some other to 0%, when COVID hit, see their site.

actual dollars in existence (M1 vs M0 etc)

Physical money, coin, vault cash, etc often limited, including by War On Cash now. M2/capita is more related to gold price, M2 is exploding through various means.

interest is not created at the time the loan ... unbalanced

Instead of simply walking away upon recognizing unbalance, conditioning and systematic control blackmarking structures can trip people and entire nations into doing theft and war to steal resources to pay it back and balance the books. Curiously, some religions forbid interest, but in practice even some strict among them still can be seen hypocritically using interest and derivatives in some form or another, laughably certifying them as legit. Even paper gold and gold leasing have become a thing for decades now. Also left out was the underlying structure known as Govt [Treasury] Bonds, the utter bullshit premise that a Government can issue them to backstop even their own central banks, that a Govt can enslave tax you and attach whatever little you still freely own, without your explicit consent, into backing the debts of the Govt, Central, and Commercial banks, and their lendees. The idea being that, when all defaults roll up, that you get stuck with pay off their bond, else international and other claimants invade. Too big to fail? QE2inf? Inflate out? Nope, pay us. That's like ridiculous notion you are and bound yourself to some fantasy Constitutions or "social contracts" without explicitly signing, by unluck of being born into such shitholes, letting such unfiduciary unrepresentatives continue to elect themselves and rule over you with their democracies. Feel like shit and a dumbass yet? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_as_an_investment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_holdings Upside... cryptocurrencies and even gold, guns and goats are coming into more favor worldwide now. People don't want to be left holding the short end of fiat. Collapse or not, these harder forms are still infinitely useful to your cause. When literally every place on the planet is now overrun by Government and Central Banks, every flavor in history, now joining into one, holding their lightswitch and risks over you... one answer is not to keep trying to fix them, but to route around and get rid of them, to go entirely different ways that don't involve them.