(March 15, 2011 at 6:15 pm)theVOID Wrote: Bullshit, you can keep it all in cash if you like. You use a Bank because in reality it's worth any hassles.He uses bank because he wants his cash safe.
The problem is that you can take down a bank with 800m dollars of received cash by taking out 192k dollars
Quote:The protests in Wisconsin against the actions of Governor Scott Walker’s attack on collective bargaining rights have given rise to interesting methods. One in particular is of interest to this website, because it represents a live test of sort of action which I wrote about in this post.
A group of about 200 protesters swarmed an M&I Bank location in Madison, due to that bank’s having supported Governor Walker’s now much-regretted election. M&I Bank has whinged that donations to Governor Walker’s campaign were not from bank funds, and that they really just love everyone equally.
It is only reasonable to assume that M&I Bank needs to be put in its place, and Wisconsin firefighters did just that. They picketed the Madison branch of M&I, and withdrew about $192,000 in deposits. This had the most pleasant effect of shutting the branch down.
This is a teachable moment! It shows how close to the edge M&I, and indeed all banks operate. They are one angry protest away from running out of money. Let’s consider the specific M&I branch which was successfully shut down. It is located on Capitol Square (address is easy enough to find) and as of 30 June 2010, it had about $818,243,000 in total deposits. [source, search for "Dane Country", first entry]
Now, putting the pieces together: a bank with $818,241,000 in deposits was shuttered by withdrawing a mere $192,000. In other words, the firefighters withdrew 0.02% of total deposits, and closed the branch.
