Banking question

[Dom Tuk]

Can any leading UK bank or for that matter any leading bank in the world survive if all its creditors/depositors decided to withdraw all their funds in a short space of time. Do bnaks have liquid cash/or access to it is a short time??

[Loosehead]

I read an article once that said on a good day most banks could not come up with 5% of what is deposited with them so they would collapse if everyone attempted to withdraw their money. Savers money is spread all around in property cars holidays credit card bills etc etc mostly non liquid assetts so whilst in theory the bank is looking after savers money in reality to get it they would have to demand immediate payement of what it is owed by borrowers, impossible to do in a reasonable time frame

[AlanS107]

Most of the cash that bank's have is invested. If there was a run on a bank, it would restrict the amount of money that people could draw at any one time, or even stop handing out cash altogether, as happened in Argentina some time ago.