It's offical. The protestors are getting stupider.

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Kopikatsu

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http://www.cnbc.com/id/44800021/

So, a group of the Occupy Wall Street protestors decided, 'Hey. Let's make a Bank Run!' (For those who don't know what that is, it's when a bunch of people go to withdraw their money at the same time with the purpose of causing the bank to crash. This happens because the banks don't actually have large amounts of money in them. When you put money in the bank, they loan that money out to other people.)

When this happens on a wide scale, it's called a bank panic. Know what happened the last time a bank panic occurred? The Great Depression. And no, that wasn't coincidental. The bank panic directly caused the Great Depression because everyone attempting to withdraw money that didn't exist caused the economy to completely collapse. Which leads me to my point-

Crashing the economy would mean that the 99% will be the only ones who suffer. The people with obscene amounts of money will just ride through the inevitable rampant inflation like nothing happened while everyone else loses everything because they can't afford $1,000 loafs of bread.

People keep bitching about police brutality that isn't even happening. Maybe the police actually do need to start beating some sense into these people.
 

Something Amyss

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Dec 3, 2008
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Your summary of the trigger of the great depression is quite glib, but if it helps you spin your narrative, I say embrace it. LOL PROTESTERS!
 

Versuvius

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It's a good way of proving the point that the banks are creating a false economy. Which is bad.
 

Kopikatsu

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Zachary Amaranth said:
Your summary of the trigger of the great depression is quite glib, but if it helps you spin your narrative, I say embrace it. LOL PROTESTERS!
Alright, I'll go a bit more indepth.

The Great Depression first 'started' when the stock market started to tank. Because value was going down so quickly, everyone started selling off their shares. Since everyone was selling their stock but nobody was really buying, it caused the stock market to crash so rapidly that banks were forced to shut down because, in addition to giving people loans (Who then used that to invest in the stock market), they also invested in the stock market themselves.

With news that some banks were falling, a great number of people pulled their money out of banks at the same time. Because the banks didn't actually HAVE that money to give out (Because it was loaned out to other people), those banks were forced to close as well.

Companies and businesses that failed to pull out of the banks fast enough lost all of their money when the bank closed. So it became a race against time to pull out all of your money, which caused the banks to fail even faster.

It was a self-fulfilling prophecy. People took their money out of the bank because they were afraid it would fail, which caused them to fail...

Anyway, the banks going down caused many businesses to go bankrupt which meant many people lost their jobs. Prices started to inflate, but noone was making enough money to pay the higher prices. So more people lost their jobs because the business couldn't afford to keep them on because nobody was buying their products, but noone was buying their products because nobody had any money.

And so the cycle continued until the global economy crashed. Fun story, no?

Edit: So while the trigger of the Great Depression was the crash of the stock market, by doing a wide-scale bank run, they're skipping that step and going straight to 'crash the banks'. Which is what actually caused the GD.
 

JCBFGD

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Ah, yes, because a group of imbeciles completely represents tens of thousands of people, right?

Try again. Without the lies, if you would.
 

viranimus

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Versuvius said:
It's a good way of proving the point that the banks are creating a false economy.
Yeah that seems to be the only thing this movement will be able to accomplish in its current state. Shining the light onto grievous problems. Yes it would hurt them, but it would service what they are trying to accomplish there. (not that I think its a good idea, really its stupid, dangerous and most importantly unneeded. Guess what Hipsters... Everyone already knows Banks are shady and its easy to expose their weaknesses, We dont need you knocking that house of cards over right now. K?)
 

Kopikatsu

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JCBFGD said:
Ah, yes, because a group of imbeciles completely represents tens of thousands of people, right?

Try again. Without the lies, if you would.
According to their page, 40,333 people (so far) will be participating in this. Try again.
 

Versuvius

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viranimus said:
Versuvius said:
It's a good way of proving the point that the banks are creating a false economy.
Yeah that seems to be the only thing this movement will be able to accomplish in its current state. Shining the light onto grievous problems. Yes it would hurt them, but it would service what they are trying to accomplish there. (not that I think its a good idea, really its stupid, dangerous and most importantly unneeded. Guess what Hipsters... Everyone already knows Banks are shady and its easy to expose their weaknesses, We dont need you knocking that house of cards over right now. K?)
Well it's either live with the shitty unchanging status quo or do unbelieviably stupid things to try and get things moving to change. I can't condemn it, i might even be on their side and defend them. But what they are still doing is stupid, but stupid things (that arent the religious zealots/teaparty brands of stupidity) might work.
 

chocolatekake

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Versuvius said:
It's a good way of proving the point that the banks are creating a false economy. Which is bad.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're saying, but it's not the banks that are doing that. It's the government. We have nothing actually backing our money because we've been off the gold/silver standard for a while. And aside from that, the banks don't really have that much in the way of effect on the economy.

Crashing banks is definitely a stupid idea and it really seems to cause a lot more problems than it could probably ever solve.
 

JCBFGD

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Kopikatsu said:
JCBFGD said:
Ah, yes, because a group of imbeciles completely represents tens of thousands of people, right?

Try again. Without the lies, if you would.
According to their page, 40,333 people (so far) will be participating in this. Try again.
I don't have a facebook, and can't see how many have RSVP'd. I'm a bit hesitant to believe you, since you made the huge mistake/lie of saying that there's no police brutality. I'll go ahead and play along just this once, and say that these people entirely miss the point of the protest. It seems there're too many people thinking, "WOO PROTEST! FUCK THE WHOEVS!" and these people are clearly part of that group. I suppose, also, that in theory, this could be another set-up by police (it's happened before, or at least, something was suspected to be such a thing). Hopefully, these morons won't carry through with it.
 

unoleian

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Moving to a credit union or a smaller local bank is a fantastic idea. I'm months ahead of the curve on that one. The message and the result is sound. I don't think jumping ship on cue is the greatest idea, but the intent is certainly laudable.
 

Tanakh

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Wow OP, did you read the link? If so, and unless you have more than $20 grand in the bank they are just trying to help pass regulation on banks and prevent them from charging you $3-5 bucks (per month? per transaction? the wording isn't clear).

And not to worry OP, see the wealth distribution? If the current social science numbers are right and assuming this guys are at or below the average wealth for an American they have sooo little money (http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/dec/10/bernie-s/bernie-sanders-viral-speech-says-top-1-percent-ear/) the banks literally don't give a crap about them as clients and only have them to charge the transactions with micro payments.
 

Palfreyfish

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I see the potential for a lot of muggings and pickpocketings... And if they want to crash the economy, that's just plain dumb.
 

Da Orky Man

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Apr 24, 2011
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Genuine Evil said:
Im not going to pretend to understand economics (because I don?t ) but from what ive seen police brutality is happening. so if you lie about that why should I believe anything else you say?

also yes a large scale withdraw is a bad, bad idea .
Police brutality is when they kidnap and torture you for weeks. It's not when someone gets pushed back because they tried to punch a police officer.

EDIT: Will everybody stop quoting me? I merely wanted to point out that the occasional arrest is not brutality, nor is an officer defending themselves. I may have overstated it, but still.
 

Firstmark_Bannor

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Honestly crashing the American economy might be the the thing to do. History has shown us repeatedly that new countries are formed when old ones die, this is just another step in that cycle. I voted for Barack but the American government doesn't work, it's slanted against the people. If the founding fathers were alive today they would weep at the state of the republic. Yeah things will be hard and there will be blood but that is the price for progress. We need to man up and fall down so we can start again properly. But this just my opinion.
 

Kopikatsu

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Tanakh said:
Wow OP, did you read the link? If so, and unless you have more than $20 grand in the bank they are just trying to help pass regulation on banks and prevent them from charging you $3-5 bucks (per month? per transaction? the wording isn't clear).

And not to worry OP, see the wealth distribution? If the current social science numbers are right and assuming this guys are at or below the average wealth for an American they have sooo little money (http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/dec/10/bernie-s/bernie-sanders-viral-speech-says-top-1-percent-ear/) the banks literally don't give a crap about them as clients and only have them to charge the transactions with micro payments.
I did read the link, I use a debit card, and my Wells Fargo account happens to have less than $20k in it. Am I upset about it? Sure. Am I willing to potentially crash the economy over it? Fuck no. That's such an extreme overreaction that I don't even know how to respond to it.

I'm not really sure why people complain about the wealth distribution. Wasn't the point of capitalism for people who are successful to become fabulously wealthy beyond their wildest dreams, and people who aren't successful go and work for those who are?

I don't get the point of it. If you want 'financial equality', then you should probably look into communism. But then, Americans freak the fuck out whenever communism is mentioned, don't they?
 

Tanakh

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chocolatekake said:
Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're saying, but it's not the banks that are doing that. It's the government. We have nothing actually backing our money because we've been off the gold/silver standard for a while. And aside from that, the banks don't really have that much in the way of effect on the economy.
Wait, what? So you are saying that the Subprime mortgage crisis in which banks were issuing risky mortgages and masking them as AAA debt to defraud investors and make money had nothing to do with banks? Go figure.

Mate, banks don't print money, but they can do a bunch of other financial instruments, which in the current virtual world it's almost the same.
 

Whateveralot

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Versuvius said:
It's a good way of proving the point that the banks are creating a false economy. Which is bad.
There's not much free will involved though. Every bank has regulations that state how much money they can "create". That, and banks don't actually print money themselves, so they still need to receive the physical money from someone else; the monitary union.