Note: If everyone pulled all their deposits from all banks simultaneously, the financial sector would essentially collapse period.
At this point, there is no one dollar for every deposit anymore. The system is based on statistical multiplexing which has the baked in assumption whereby the case that everyone cones demanding their money will never happen. It works for the most part until everyone gets to the point they want their assets.
It's like dividing by 0, and there are a lot of people who will work very hard to frustrate any attempt to do so. They'll be very persuasive too.
>Are you trying to cause civilization to collapse?
>Do you not pike the standard of living you enjoy?
>You don't like being able to feed yourself and your family too do you?
The underpinnings of finance has been completely seperated from every experience for years, and if you even embark on a quest to understand them, you'll end up being confronted with the unsettling feeling that everything seems way more complicated and opaque than it needs to be. The jargon is nigh-impenetrable. The assumptionsand extrema very ill-conditioned, and it seems like the only reason we don't do anything to fundamentally change any dynamics of it seems to be that no one has any way of predicting the right way to go, but everyone seems to be capable of telling you that what you plan on doing will inevitably fail. A characteristic, I might add of a very poorly understood/conditioned system.
And yes. I'm aware of the irony of my post being an example of the very thing I'm calling out. The difference is, I treat the financial system as what it fundamentally is. A statistical multiplexer; just like your internet uplink, just like telecommunications equipment, just like insurance. It takes a limited amount of physically money'd throughput, amplifies it via fractional reserve mechanisms, and as long as the entire system doesn't come for their money all at once, the system cranks along just fine. If they do, you have a bank run, game over for the financial system. My major issue is the discussion always stops there. I want to know what the hell next steps are, because it seems damn irresponsible and cowardly to me that the powers that be are more than happy to perpetuate a system that keeps them on top, but are seemingly incapable of being depended upon to take any intellectual/political risk when it comes to acknowledging failure states happen. The furthest I've traced out, is bank run happens, FDIC kicks in, Federal Reserve picks up the onus as lender of last resort for banks. Woopdie doo. The Fed also seems to have the authority to wave minimal capital reserve requirements, so really they can do basically whatever they seem to want in the absence of other solvent banks. And make no mistake, the U.S. can still screw the pooch in servicing all those treasuries the rest of the world has a penchant for parking money in. The question is, what then?
>Do we just say, "Nah? Not happening?"
>Renegotiate?
>Inflate away? As the world reserve currency, we're supposedly the only one in a position to do that as long as we can defend the political circumstances granting the dollar that status.
>Declare "Come and take it?" With our military, and a large enough group of people in the grips of a sudden surge of patriotism, the United States could still theoretically get by with defending itself from outright military action, but the diplomatic damage done to the country's reputation would be a smoking crater in the short term.
>Try something completely different?
The knock on effects aren't trivial, but they are there. One of the most important lessons I've learned in life is that just because you've ignored a problem doesn't make it go away. As a society, we've ignored this problem for many years.
Banking is about trust first and foremost. If you can't trust the person you're lending to/depositing with, you're done. Your capability to organize is shot. The money changing hands in one amount vs. another isn't anywhere nearas important as the trust that makes I'll give you this piece of paper for the thing I need, then you can give it to someone else for what you need. In a way, these times are brought about by the compounding interest of lies as applied to our economic framework. I'm not entirely convinced that in the end, the solution won't end up being something along the lines of getting the biggest con man on the planet to pitch a nonsense idea in a way that convinces everyone, and just make horrible things happen to people who are unfortunate enough to call it out as bollocks.
At least that seems to have been the modus operandi thus far as best as I can get anyone to not answer. (I.e. continual refusal to answer a question as asked).
I really do hope there is someone out there who legitimately gets it, but I'm not entirely convinced the whole thing isn't some odd society-scale macro-thought, uncontemplable in it's entirety by an individual, but nevertheless played out/manifested by collective behavior. Once you hit that point of complexity though what any one person says is meaningless, and what everyone does is what is important.
So talking about it seems pointless; as frustrating to me as that is to me as a person who believes any system should be able to be rendered into an articulable description.
Anywho... Breakfast time. If you've read to this point, I apologize. I did start this post with the best of intentions. It just seems to have spiralled into incomprehensability.
EDIT: I hate economics. I can get some use out of it when it focuses on being descriptive of its field of study, but I find its purported predictive aspects to be sorely lacking.
EDIT2: When I use them most of the time. And not even consistently so, which would apparently be amazing.