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It's A Wonderful Life Bank Run

Hoosiertown · 492.7K views · 2014-12-07 · 4:01

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Overview

The bank run scene from It's a Wonderful Life, in which George Bailey explains to depositors why the bank cannot pay everyone back at once.

On Hacker News

Used as a classic analogy for fractional reserve banking and bank runs.

Discussed on HN; no positive recommendation is recorded in this export · HN mentions 2019–2023

Topics

Macroeconomics & financial crisesFilm & TV clipsInvesting & personal finance
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bankingfractional reservefilm clipsvbfinance

What people said

costco · 2023-03 · Reference

Where are the people offering to buy SVB claims for 60-70 cents on the dollar? This happened with FTX and traditional bank runs like in [It's a Wonderful Life]( [VIDEO] ). Maybe people are waiting to see how large the FDIC advances will be.

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haberman · 2021-02 · Reference

Call me crazy but I thought the idea is that banks would use deposits to fund loans and kick some of the profit back to the account holder in the form of reasonable interest rates. That seems capital efficient to me, but it's apparently a quaint relic of the past now that eternal 0% interest rates are the norm. I'm reminded of the scene from It's a Wonderful Life where George Bailey explains to all his account holders why they can't all withdraw their money at once, because it's being put to productive use by their fellow townspeople: [VIDEO]

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holy_city · 2019-06 · Reference

Someone once told me that U of Chicago's business school used this classic to describe banking: [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by Hoosiertown, played through YouTube.

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