Re: Y2K-Plan of action..

mark@unicorn.com
Mon, 15 Feb 1999 03:45:41 -0800 (PST)

Brent Allsop [allsop@swttools.fc.hp.com] wrote:
>Could this really cause such a collapse?

Yes. I don't know what the average salary is these days, but as I said before, *after* they've printed all that extra cash, assuming none of it goes offshore as most dollars have in the past, there will be about $800 per person available. That's it. Either they can start printing even larger amounts of money and risk hyperinflation, or they have to stop people taking out large amounts of money.

The biggest problem is that a lot of people who have a lot more than $800 in their bank accounts are discovering this.

This leaves us with a choice:

  1. Take out the money, have it all at home where it may be useful.
  2. Don't take it out, potentially lose access to it for a long time, potentially have the banks collapse and lose it all, if other people take theirs out.

As I said, this is a prisoners' dilemna situation, and the rational solution is to take the money out. And since we've recently seen similar situations in Russia where those who took their money out did well and those who didn't lost out, we have even more encouragement to be rational.

Mark