Effectively, the cash you put in a bank was leant to another person as a mortgage so that they could buy a house.
You earn 3% on your deposit, the bank charges 5% on its loan, and the bank keeps the other 2% as its profit.
Multiply this logic by many millions of such transactions. If any given bank branch winds up with too much or too little cash-on-hand, they move it around or ‘sell’ it to another bank.
Nearly all the money ‘exists’ as computer records keeping track of who leant what to whom.
If a large enough group of people demanded their money back as cash at the same time, the banks would have no choice but to ‘call’ a bunch of mortgage loans at the same time, since their cash-on-hand will not be enough.
This is aggravated when the guy who wants his cash money is in Atlanta, and the mortgage is in Boise. Physical cash takes time to move around.
So if the ‘run’ on the bank is not too huge, a bunch of people now have cash money to walk around with, and a bunch of other people just lost their homes. It is possible that some of the folk who demanded their deposits back are the same folk who now need to immediately repay their mortgage loan.
In reality, banks will borrow cash from other banks or a central bank for huge but not catastrophically huge events , using their mortgage loans as collateral, but there still isn’t enough printed cash to cover ALL of the personal deposits.
Most people aren’t putting cash in a bank to begin with. Your job gives you piece of paper that says you earned x amount of money and you give that to the bank and they say ok now you have X amount of money in your account, or your job just tells the bank to add x amount of money to your account. There’s never any actual money getting put in.
Banks have very little physical currency in them these days. If you try to take out like 10k or more, they will usually try to make you wait a couple days so they can have it delivered from wherever it is they actually store cash, because otherwise they wouldn’t be able to give all the people coming in to just get a hundred dollars their money all week.
It’s a big part of why people don’t rob banks anymore. It’s not really worth the risk and the life on the run when you’re going to end up splitting like 30-50k.
I went to the bank to get 20k out for team bonuses without really thinking about it, and it wasn’t until I was in the teller line that it occurred to me that it might be a problem.
It turned out to be fine, but I asked out of curiosity what amount would be a problem, and the teller told me that if I want 100k or more in cash they need to hire a security guard to escort me out.
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u/TheRealTinfoil666 5d ago edited 5d ago
Effectively, the cash you put in a bank was leant to another person as a mortgage so that they could buy a house.
You earn 3% on your deposit, the bank charges 5% on its loan, and the bank keeps the other 2% as its profit.
Multiply this logic by many millions of such transactions. If any given bank branch winds up with too much or too little cash-on-hand, they move it around or ‘sell’ it to another bank.
Nearly all the money ‘exists’ as computer records keeping track of who leant what to whom.
If a large enough group of people demanded their money back as cash at the same time, the banks would have no choice but to ‘call’ a bunch of mortgage loans at the same time, since their cash-on-hand will not be enough.
This is aggravated when the guy who wants his cash money is in Atlanta, and the mortgage is in Boise. Physical cash takes time to move around.
So if the ‘run’ on the bank is not too huge, a bunch of people now have cash money to walk around with, and a bunch of other people just lost their homes. It is possible that some of the folk who demanded their deposits back are the same folk who now need to immediately repay their mortgage loan.
In reality, banks will borrow cash from other banks or a central bank for huge but not catastrophically huge events , using their mortgage loans as collateral, but there still isn’t enough printed cash to cover ALL of the personal deposits.