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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3326 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 26, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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I have a dumb question that I thought of while reading an article about the SVB thing. Say you have $50 million in a savings account. You are really smart (or an idiot) and after doing your research you expect the entire banking system to collapse in a few weeks, and you want to take your money out and figuratively “stuff it under your mattress” (as in not just wire it to a different bank account). Is it possible to even do this? I know you can’t just walk into a bank branch and ask for your $50 million dollars, but say you informed them ahead of time, will they actually be able to give you $50 million in 100 dollar bills? If they can, will they deliver it to you in an armored car, or is it your problem to figure out what to do with it? Is there some way of dealing with this where the Fed will hold it for you in something like a “bank account”, or you can get some sort of government IOU so you don’t need to take it out of the banking system in cash?

At first I thought this was a pretty inane question, but after thinking about it for a bit, I found it rather interesting. Taking your question 100% literally, how does one withdraw millions of dollars in cash? Based on this Reddit post/comment it does seem like it’s possible:

https://old.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/n3mbyl/could_someone_withdraw_a_million_dollars_from/

Who knows if that’s true, but it sounds pretty reasonable to me. I have to imagine this is an incredibly rare occurrence.

Thanks, that pretty much answers it, seems like they bank will arrange the cash order with the government for you but it’s your responsibility to take delivery

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