I saw plenty of reporting on this, and nearly all of it was editorialized: it was being treated as evidence that customer savings weren't available, when the actual reason is that bank branches simply don't keep massive vaults of money on hand.

If you have a bank account, you can always withdraw your savings (at least up to the amount insured, in the event of a bank collapse). But there has never been a guarantee that you can walk up to a teller and leave with your life savings in a bag; you should always call ahead and coordinate with the bank to ensure that they have the physical paper available. In many cases, they'll redirect you to a specialized or more central branch.

I used to work for a bank in the US as a teller before 2019.

You absolutely can walk in and ask for 12K in cash. That amount is normal.

If you’re asking for 30-50K then coordination is needed, and its not because money is not available, simply because youd need to open the vault and that takes time.

I think there's a large degree of variance here: I've been in places that would have struggled to hand over $1000 in cash, since they might have had only 2-3 times that total on hand for the entire week.

That was in a small town, but that's my point: anecdotes about being unable to withdraw money are more about logistics than a banking collapse being hidden from the public.

This was in a branch that before pandemic would fork out 10k easily. I’m not the only one who experienced this - my friends experienced this across different banks in different states.

This doesn't contradict what I've said, and doesn't imply financial instability: it's not particularly surprising that banks weren't receiving as many cash deliveries during the first year of the pandemic, or that demand for cash withdrawals was higher than normal.

And 99% of the time people do that is because they’re moving banks and they leave with a cashiers check instead of cash.

So, to be clear, you can’t actually liquidate your account.

No, it’s that it is incredibly rare for someone to actually want to liquidate their account because the reason people do is usually to move banks and that use-case is better served with a cashier’s check. It’s not at all surprising that random branches don’t keep that much cash.

You can always liquidate your account. What you can't do is make it some random branch's problem in a spur-of-the-moment decision; you have to plan it with them.

No, that doesn't follow. You can definitely remove large amounts of cash, you just have to think ahead a little. Also, you have overlooked the fact that for many people a cashier's check is more convenient than a large wad of cash, especially if their sole object is to deposit it at a competing institution.

There is not an issue with the safety of banks. There was an issue with the amount of physical cash in the right place - during the pandemic (like any panic, recession etc) lots of people rush to cash and there isn’t enough of it. May mean the same thing when you can’t get the cash but it’s an important distinction. Ultimately very few people use cash so why have massive stocks everywhere, use it or lose it people…

This is not very surprising since there was a run even on toilet paper in March 2020. (I remember the empty shelves in Manhattan, and my relatives in Finland told the same story.)

If people will buy stacks of toilet paper they don’t need, of course they would empty the cash machines too.

From the atm or the teller ?

ATM limit of 1k is common.

My small local credit union keeps about 10k in each of the tellers drawers . So you should be able to easily go up to 50k cash withdrawal .

If it’s a large multinational , 100k I suspect.

Also why not just go 10 days in a row and pull out 1k?

> Also why not just go 10 days in a row and pull out 1k?

In the US, this could be considered "structuring" to avoid reporting requirements which is a federal crime with a sentence of up to 5 years in prison.

If the reason to pull out 1K/day is a 1K/day limit imposed by the bank, then the reason is obviously not to avoid reporting requirements and therefore it cannot be considered structuring.

And yet people are prosecuted.

[citation needed]

During COVID I had no trouble withdrawing $7k from my local credit union for a car purchase, it just took a minute for them to get a manager to look over the transaction