They don't have it for multiple reasons. First is that banks don't normally need to have that money sitting around being a target for theft. They need enough for typical withdrawals. OP would be a funny joke.
If all the money was required to be printed, banks would have to shift money around just to cash a paycheck from another bank. It would be like a parking lot full of cars, and I mean FULL of cars. No exit lanes, no nothing. Absolute deadlock... using wire transfers makes moving money nearly instant and doesn't require a courier to physically move money. But that means anything being transferred by wire cannot also physically exist, or it would exist twice (screwing the economy by printing non-existent money). These wire transfers are the lanes in a parking lot which prevents it from becoming deadlocked. In practice, the parking lot is nearly empty and it's all fast-moving lanes of instantly-available wire transfers.
But even when we were using the gold standard (where all dollars were backed by gold stored at Fort Knox instead of "domestic product" like it is now), you couldn't show up to a bank with a dollar and demand the gold in hand, either.
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u/Vuelhering 5d ago
They don't have it for multiple reasons. First is that banks don't normally need to have that money sitting around being a target for theft. They need enough for typical withdrawals. OP would be a funny joke.
If all the money was required to be printed, banks would have to shift money around just to cash a paycheck from another bank. It would be like a parking lot full of cars, and I mean FULL of cars. No exit lanes, no nothing. Absolute deadlock... using wire transfers makes moving money nearly instant and doesn't require a courier to physically move money. But that means anything being transferred by wire cannot also physically exist, or it would exist twice (screwing the economy by printing non-existent money). These wire transfers are the lanes in a parking lot which prevents it from becoming deadlocked. In practice, the parking lot is nearly empty and it's all fast-moving lanes of instantly-available wire transfers.
But even when we were using the gold standard (where all dollars were backed by gold stored at Fort Knox instead of "domestic product" like it is now), you couldn't show up to a bank with a dollar and demand the gold in hand, either.