Hypothetical questions about mass withdrawals of cash in a country

Dunners182

To my understanding if a percentage of the population were to withdraw all their money from the banks, the country would go into financial ruin and nobody would come out the winner. Would it technically be possible for a "protest group" to hold this threat over a government's head for demands to be met? I believe banks only hold 10-15% of peoples cash and have the rest out on loans and investments so if its possible how many people would need to get together to do this sort of thing?

dotsman

If nothing was done, yes it would destroy the country. However, actions would be taken to prevent it. The first one would be to simply limit withdrawals until things calm down. This was done recently in Greece and previously in Argentina. It's not a question of how many people, it's really a question of how much money. 10,000 wealthy people, each with hundreds of thousands of euro in savings would do more damage than 100,000 thousand people with 1,000 in savings.

Even if you could secretly co-ordinate hundreds of thousands of people to withdraw their savings all at the same time, they would simply be referred to as a "suicide group" instead of a "protest group".

BuffyBot

outside the remit of this forum