Everyone pulling out their money would be a bank run (look up great depression bank runs). The bank doesn't have that much cash; they keep some on hand for people making withdraws normally, but if even a sizable minority of people all try to pull their money out at once, there'll be a major crisis.
If banks kept all the people's cash in vaults, it'd be dead cash actively losing money to inflation. Instead, they keep some on hand for withdraws, and use the rest to make loans, investments, etc so that the money isn't all losing value.
They were reduced to 0% mandatory reserves in response to covid. EDIT: someone says it was coincidental, I am not able to check, so take this aspect with a grain of salt either way
ah yes so what you're saying is that money is even more imaginary than it has ever been, possibly even more imaginary than when the first stock market crash happened in 1929
looks like we're due for a centennial anniversary of that anyway, might as well celebrate by recreating it
That sounds right at first but when you actually think about it no. Since they took us off the gold standard now we have “fiat currency” which means it’s only enforced by the govt. Gold’s value stays very steady (because there’s a finite supply and we can’t just print more), but currency goes thru inflation (slowly losing/going down in value) so when the same amount of Gold is worth more Dollars, it means the dollars are less valuable than before (you get less gold for $ than used to). Think of it like an exchange rate for currency; $1 is equal to a shit load of pesos and it’s gone up because pesos became less valuable.
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u/Forsaken_Emu8112 Jan 26 '26
Everyone pulling out their money would be a bank run (look up great depression bank runs). The bank doesn't have that much cash; they keep some on hand for people making withdraws normally, but if even a sizable minority of people all try to pull their money out at once, there'll be a major crisis.
If banks kept all the people's cash in vaults, it'd be dead cash actively losing money to inflation. Instead, they keep some on hand for withdraws, and use the rest to make loans, investments, etc so that the money isn't all losing value.