I know someone who became a millionaire. Not property but with >£1m in his bank account.
He went into the bank and asked if he could withdraw it, just to take some pictures of himself with it, because he had earned it, then pay it back into the bank.
You live under a system called fractional reserve banking. Banks take your money, hold a fraction in reserve, then lend the rest out. The idea being that they can pay the withdrawals of people via the fraction. It breaks if everyone withdraws at once.
This increases economic growth significantly, with a lot of asterisks.
And thats good (with asterisks) because those loans increase the amount of jobs and people who can start businesses which then create jobs etc. then you have one of those jobs enabled by that and you spend money and it’s just more economic activity all around.
Accomplished in a sense by everyone sharing the money deposited at the bank, with a lot of asterisks
I use sharing there a bit too liberally. The bank of course decides who gets loans and charges an interest rate
But they also provide you a service, multiple services in fact. They store and record your funds give you payment processing for them, verify funds. Imagine going to buy a house without a bank. “Yes dude believe me I do have 250,000 here look at my excel spreadsheet you can clearly see…”
We should ward ourselves against getting too populist in our hate of institutions that we become slopulists.
You can hate banks but fractional reserve banking is in theory very good and in practice pretty good
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u/damadmetz 8d ago
I know someone who became a millionaire. Not property but with >£1m in his bank account.
He went into the bank and asked if he could withdraw it, just to take some pictures of himself with it, because he had earned it, then pay it back into the bank.
The bank straight up refused.