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by white_devil 5462 days ago
> Yes. I am sure. I have far, far, far less than 0.000001% of the total money in the bank. If they could not produce this much money when I wanted it, there would be other serious problems.

Last year, a branch office of a large bank in Finland was barely able to produce 10 000 euros in cash when I wanted to withdraw it.

The clerk just didn't realize he shouldn't mention it.

Don't be so sure.

1 comments

Is that a case of the bank not having the money or just that branch not having the cash on hand?
Each branch is supposed to function as a bank, right?
Why in the world should a single branch be expected to hold that kind of cash for withdrawn without notice? There is a* huge* difference between "having the money" and "having the money in cash form on location".
They're not autonomous though - individual branches don't hold the value of all their customers' accounts as cash. You're subject to a daily limit (though you can take more if you give them notice).
Now we're just being pedantic. My point was that each branch should have enough cash to act as a "proper bank", whatever amount of money you'd reasonably expect one to have in its vault.

But I'd sure expect more than 10k euro.

If they barely had 10k in their vault, then it logically follows that they almost never need that much (otherwise they would obviously make it a point to keep more). If they rarely need that much, then it logically follows that somewhere at or less than 10k is a reasonable amount to have. There is no sense in taking the increased liability of having more if they don't need to.

Furthermore, acting as a "proper bank" means they do a lot more than just acting as your personal piggy-bank/mattress. If they have all their money tied up in cash, it means they can't actually be preforming real bank activities (investment).

Fair enough. But basically me and a couple of other people on this thread wanted to point out that the banking system is not very sound.

I just chimed in with my anecdote.