PDA

View Full Version : Start a Rothbardian Bankrun (Prof. Joe Salerno)




bobbyw24
03-03-2010, 10:41 AM
When I was an undergraduate at Boston College in the 1970s, one of the weekly underground newspapers that catered to the 250,000 college students in the Boston metropolitan area featured a page-length ad by the graduate economic students of the Boston chapter of URPE (Union of Radical Political Economists). The ad appealed to the college students of Boston to withdraw all the cash from their checking and saving accounts the following Friday as a protest against the Vietnam War. Being an economics major and neophyte Austrian, I realized that such an action would cause severe difficulties for the banks, because they only held (at the time) about 13 cents of every dollar of demand deposits and 3 cents of every dollar of saving deposits in the form of cash. The rest of the deposits were lent out for longer or shorter periods of time despite the fact that the banks had contractually obligated themselves to redeem the entire amount on demand. There was much discussion of such an action on the BC and other Boston campuses during the week leading up to the mass action. Of course, when Friday rolled around the event fizzled, because students were too busy partying (Thursday being the unofficial start of the weekend). But the idea was a sound one.


Murray Rothbard never tired of pointing out that in a free society plain citizens could bring inflationary fractional reserve banks to heel through a deliberate and concerted campaign to get people to withdraw their deposits in cash. “Antibank Leagues,” as he called them, would be formed by those “who know the truth about the real insolvency of the banking system” to “urge bank runs.” The bank runs or their very threat would “be able to stop and reverse monetary expansion.”

Now we have the first stirrings of the formation of such a league in the Move Your Money campaign. This modest but growing movement is urging people to move their money from big banks to small community banks and credit unions. Establishment media such as Time, Newsweek, The Nation, Salon and CBS News have already taken note of the campaign. The organizers are urging people to
lobby their friends, organizations, and municipal governments to move their money and to use online social networks to propagate the idea.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig6/salerno6.1.1.html

tmosley
03-03-2010, 10:57 AM
I'm not sure that would work now, as the banks have huge amounts of excess reserves. FRB has more or less broken down.

TonySutton
03-03-2010, 11:27 AM
flash mob

SimpleName
03-03-2010, 10:39 PM
This is a great idea. The FDIC would have one hell of a fun time sorting that mess out. The one probably, although I may be missing something, would be that the depositors would temporarily lose all their deposits, wouldn't they?

GBurr
03-04-2010, 12:33 PM
Bank runs are illegal. If you try to plan one prepare to have the Feds breathing down your neck really fast.