A friend tells me that there’s going to be a global bank holiday tomorrow and that electricity, for some reason, will stop, and advised to stock up on food water and cash.
Do with that what you will. I’m not sure I believe him personally, but there’s nothing wrong with stocking up on food, water, and cash.
The Jewish Libertarian 
Now I see. Thank you Rafi and Thomas.
In Eastern Europe there is an increased number of advertisements to convince people to get credits. For the silliest of reasons – just to remind people that credits can help you educate kids and in young capitalism people may not be aware, to the down right “do you envy your neighbor’s furniture? don’t! get a credit at bank X for personal needs.” which I rank as the dumbest. Many credits for “personal needs” they don’t ask for anything other than paycheck.
What would that be about? Doesn’t the bank lose money if people over-credit themselves to the bank and it falls tomorrow and it can execute them let’s say but they don’t always ask for physical guarantees, sometimes paycheck is enough for smaller sums and then they can execute however they want but if the people don’t have the cash then they don’t have it if the contract doesn’t say a good exchanges the debt?
At the global scale – to you think these campaigns are a stupid short-termed risky move or do they make sense? (like giving the bank activity, make money from people based on interests)?
Impossible or not really “global”. Banks in Europe haven’t announced anything like that and they would by now, to inform the clients who may need to visit the bank.
Mary,
The whole point of a “global bank holiday” would be to prevent people from visiting the bank. Sudden and un-pre-announced would be features, not bugs.
Not saying it’s going to happen, of course. But if it did, it wouldn’t be announced in advance.
I thought the purpose was to stop the transactions done at banks in person – retrieve money from deposits, create deposits, business from big to small who do transactions at banks by visit – for some economical reason or another. Why would they want to discourage people from using the banks?
The purpose of a bank holiday is to stop you from getting your money. They stop you from getting your money because the bank never has more than 10% of your money, and they fear too many people will ask for their money.
Exactly.
Normally a “bank holiday” occurs when the banks fear that there’s about to be a “run” — people showing up wanting to withdraw all their cash because for some reason they don’t trust the banks at the moment. For example, they think that their bank, or a bunch of banks, are about to announce that they’re insolvent; or they think the currency in use is about to crater and want to get it out and spend it while it’s still worth something.
Pre-announcing a “bank holiday” would tend to create the very panic it’s supposed to shut down. People would just run on the bank before the announced closure.
I haven’t heard any stories about a bunch of bank closures today, so it seems the rumor was false. But had it been true, they would have tried to keep it secret until the last minute.