Originally posted by Dreine

Maybe it is time for it all to come crashing down...

I am starting to agree. Hopefully the next generation will learn from our mistakes. This form of greed is unacceptable and it is slowing evolution down. Nature will find a way to move on and I think in this case it might just need to fall apart, let us tear eachother apart for a few years, and try again.

The major banks have been preparing for a collapse for quite some time. I am forced to have an account with BOA for a few different reasons and for the last 8 months or so they have started to make sure there is one or two armed guards on duty at every branch.

They are prepared for a bank run.

I have also taken large sums of $100 bills to be broken into smaller denominations and they have not had more than $2000 on hand to fulfill my requests.

They do not have a great deal of cash on hand.

Also, loans have become much harder to get. Many investment banks are liquidating assets by selling them off to smaller investment firms and are pulling back on how much money they lend.

The # hit the fan a long time ago and we have only been surviving off of the forward momentum we had. But that momentum is all but gone.

I have been talking about this for some time and I am surprised we made it this long. Good luck to you all.....we are gonna need it.

In the meantime they are teaching our kids in school that investing is the right thing to do in order to save money for the future.

My youngest comes home yesterday and says he learned something new in school today. He told me he learned that investing is a good thing to do in order to save for the future. He said they told him it will draw interest over time and his money will grow and he was all smiles as he looked at me saying this. Evidently, something they said made it pretty believable to him.

It is sad that I had to tell him, sure invest if you want your money taken, never to be seen again. Then I reminded him of the big banking scandal that put half the world in poverty and reminded him of the 99% and the 1% and then reminded him of Occupy and Anonamous and what they were all fighting for and against, and Bernie Madoff and all the other stories that will go down in history and be told, time and time again, by parents telling their children.

and as I sit here typing this I wonder if this will all be forgotten as time goes on and I wonder if this will be written in school history books. I also wonder if people in the future will find buried treasure of gold, silver and coins and paper money from where people repeated past habits to keep their money safe.

From the article linked in the original post:

"These disasters have damaged banks' reputations, but not their balance sheets. Most are still profitable, and in recent years the five banks have improved their capital bases and liquidity. They also have been subjected to annual Federal Reserve stress tests that measure whether the banks have sufficient capital to weather severe economic scenarios."

The mega-banks are much, much stronger than they were back in 2008-2009 when the financial crisis struck. They have been very, very aggressive in selling off non-core assets -- meaning, they have aggressively downsized departments and assets that are not a main part of their core operating business - i.e., deposits and loans.

Liquidity -- meaning cash on hand -- has skyrocketed at the mega-banks. The banks have money to lend, but a huge difficulty finding qualified borrowers to lend to. Profits are way up, liquidity is way up.

Maybe it is time for it all to come crashing down...

It's fair to say that we will eventually see an orchestrated event or events that will cause a One World Bank to emerge from the ash heap of our current banking structure. Consolidations will continue. Small banks will continue to get gobbled up by the big banks, and cannot compete on an even playing field with the mega-banks.

Hear, hear - time to clear the rubble so we can rebuild something lasting and of better quality for ourselves. I'd even be willing to extend that to quite a few other things as well.

Be careful what you wish for. The whole plan is to centralize the banking system into fewer and fewer hands until we eventually have a One World Bank. People decrying the current banking system will only speed up that process.

They do not have a great deal of cash on hand.

Because most banking has gone electronic. We are fast becoming a cashless society.

Also, loans have become much harder to get.

Agreed. However, loans have become difficult to get because we have had 30+ years of credit expansion and most individuals and businesses are already in debt up to their eyeballs and can barely manage their current debt loads.

I agree, the current system is now and has been for 20 years beyond saving.

These mega-banks are, after all, just a huge hodge-podge of consolidations, mergers, and acquisitions. You have people from hundreds of different banks, different software, all thrown together to try to operate as a single entity. That's one of the main reasons why the banks are so bureaucratic and inefficient.

That is kinda BS......Of course nobody can come out on top.......EVER!!!

Live a debt-free lifestyle. Pay cash for everything. Don't borrow. It can be done.

The reason the bank doesn't have much money is because it isn't required too. The Fed mandates the percentage that a bank has to have on hand, and if there was to be a run, they still have additional funds at The Fed.

If banks had to keep every dollar that the customer put in it, they couldn't make loans and that's what drives the economy. You might not like it, but that's how things work.

The problem comes from the derivatives and other exotic instruments the banks come up with to make money. Say I'm the bank and I make you a loan. Let's say I want to guarantee this cash flow so I sell it too someone else. Then they could sell it to someone else as well and you see how it keeps rolling. You can even buy "insurance" on this as well, and in some cases sell that insurance to more than one person. You also have Credit Default Swaps which get really complicated. So when one person can't pay, the dominos all start to fall.

I wouldn't say the banks are gearing up for a run at all; that's just normal procedure that they have to follow.