The idea of a bank run is where essentially everyone goes to the bank and takes their money out of the bank. The fact is that banks kind of doesn’t have your money and the bank kind of do have your money. If just you go to the bank and withdraw your money, the bank’s got your money but if everybody goes to the bank and asks for their money, the bank might not have your money. That is because banks practice fractional reserve lending.
Yellow Vests Bank Run:
In response to the Yellow Vests are going to be doing a bank run, the banks in France have been closing up. Maybe this is because they don’t want any violence at their branches. Not only banks but ATMs are also experiencing mysterious glitches where suddenly they are not working anymore. Now if you add in that to the fact that your banks only open from Monday to Friday (9 AM to 5 PM) anyway and that if you want to go to an ATM which has a daily withdrawal limit of say $500, it’s really hard to get your money out of the banks. It’s quite easy to put it in though. This all comes back to the idea of fractional reserve lending. How a bank can take a $1,000 and turn it into $10,000 is a bit of magic when it comes down to it.
For eg: A takes $1000 to the bank and you put it in his savings account. Now because of the fractional reserve lending idea, the bank only needs to keep a fraction of that money in a reserve. So they put $100 in the vault and take the other $900 and lend it out to B. Now B takes the $900 and goes to buy a car from C. Now C takes his $900 which he got from B to the bank and puts it in his savings account. Now the bank again put $90 in the vault and again lends $810 to D. This process repeats and continues but let’s just say it stops there. So A goes to the bank and tells the bank that he needs to withdraw his $1000 from the bank but the bank says they have only $190 in the vault because they lent all his money out. That is a very basic example of how it works but essentially, you take that to a large scale and the banks don’t actually physically have everyone’s money.
Now its ok if a certain percent of the population goes to the banks every day to withdraw some money as the banks are already prepared that 5% or 10% of the people are going to come and take out their money on any given day. But if everyone went to take their money out of the banks, then it becomes a big trouble for the banks because they simply do not have everyone’s money. Now we add into this a few different factors and we can see some of the real problems of the banking system.
One, of course, is that about 10% of the total money supply is in physical bills and coins. Then we have the debt factor. It is very serious because so many people have taken loans from the banks. People don’t actually have any money sitting in the banks, they just owe the banks a lot of money. So that is why it is quite difficult for everyone to do a bank run because a lot of people don’t have any money sitting in the banks at the first place and they owe tens of thousands of dollars to the banks. Looking at 2008, banks crashed the global economy and got bailed out which is a classic situation where there is socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor. Some countries also have bail in clauses where the banks can take your money bailing in which is another crazy system.
Now, all of this fraud is because the banking system is probably a system of fraud, the business model of banks is fraud and it is enabled by the debt system and the fiat money system. The fact that the governments can just keep printing money is insanely broken and every time the government prints new money, your own money becomes worth a little bit less which is crazy again because you just cannot win. The banks and the government are always the winners and that’s a pretty bad game to be playing. The fiat debt backed backing system may be the biggest scam in history and yet we all continue to support that system.
The lies are so incredibly big and they are repeated so often that people start to believe them. Money lending and the idea of charging massive amounts of interest on people for buying houses, cars etc. has made people slaves to the banks. Interestingly, the Bible was quite anti-money lending. There are quite a few passages in the Bible about the dangers of money lending and how Jesus was anti-charging interest. Remember when Jesus went to the temple, he didn’t kick out the poor, he didn’t kick out the beggars or anyone else except the money lenders.
We have created a society where the money lenders are in charge of everything and that has not given a good result to our society. We understand by the Yellow Vests protestors out in France protesting against the system because the government has supported a system that has enslaved the citizens.
A quote by Henry Ford:
“It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning”.
It seems that the French are starting to figure this out. They are sitting at a table, trying to play a game where everyone else holds the cards except the regular citizens. That is why the French people think that doing a bank run is a good idea.
Although the Yellow Vests have a very big voice and are very prominent, they do not have 100% support of everyone inside of France. A successful bank run would require everyone or near everyone to go and take their money out of the banks but that is not actually happening.
Plan Bitcoin:
Bitcoin is where the real revolution lies at. Bitcoin is meant to take the power away from banks. Bitcoin encourages people to stop supporting the banks but we are still stuck to this old system. Bitcoin is definitely the money of the future because sound money is powerful. The fact that the governments print money whenever they want is a broken system. The fact that you can only access your money when the banks say so is totally broken as it’s your money and you should have access to it 24X7, be allowed to send it to whoever you want to and whenever you want to send it. That is why the idea of a bank run is incredibly powerful but for a bank run to succeed is very difficult.
Jimmy Song has weighed in on the idea of bitcoin as a revolution. Jimmy Song said:
Revolutions, we are seeing are aiming at changing who is in charge. However, what they should be doing is taking back the power for themselves. It starts with bitcoin. If people would realize it then violence would not be necessary because they could take power away without the violence. It would be possible to change things for the better without putting lives on the line and risking jail time. It is possible to have peaceful revolutions with bitcoin.
These were the thoughts of the writer on can the French Bank Run happen and how does bitcoin play into all of this. Tell us your thoughts in the comments section below.
