LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Bank Panic
built 641 days ago
The first-person-perspective in Bank Panic has you playing a lawman protecting a town bank with twelve doors. You can see three doors at a time, while "door radar," located at the top of the screen, let's you know when someone is at a door not in your immediate view by moving the joystick left or right to shift your view of the doors. With the bank set up in a circular fashion, you can view doors one and twelve at the same time. When you stop at a door, it opens, revealing a customer wanting to deposit money, or a robber who wants to kill you. Three firing buttons correspond to one of the three doors in your line of sight. Hit the robber before he draws his gun to score points.
Source:
The Great Panic of 1907 started with a rumor that the president of the Knickerbocker Trust was about to go bankrupt. On October 22, 1907, hundreds of people went to the Knickerbocker and pulled out $8 million within three hours. The trust closed forever at noon that day and many people lost all their savings.
Source:
Trust companies rather than the banks were the key to the panic. Since 1898 they had quadrupled in size because ordinary banks were required by law to maintain large cash reserves but trust companies were not. With only 2% or 3% of their assets lying idle in the form of cash, trust companies could afford to pay high interest rates to depositors. Suddenly, with the collapse of the Knickerbocker Trust, depositors became frightened. Trust companies, with their low reserves, would be hard pressed to cover their accounts by even a moderate panic among their depositors. Still worse, there was no organization among them comparable to the Clearing House, which operated as a bulwark of mutual defense for hard-pressed banks.[5]
Source:
The bank panic hindered the economy in several ways. First, it forestalled economic growth by undermining general confidence in the economy. Second, the shortage of cash induced banks to postpone their loan services temporarily. Third, the substitution of clearinghouse certificates for cash dislocated domestic exchange; certificate exchange rates varied, preventing banks and subsequently businessmen from accepting certificates from establishments outside their locality. Finally, the shortage of currency deprived manufacturers of resources to pay wages and salaries, and many shut down their operations or reduced their production hours. These reverberations delayed economic recovery until 1909, ten months after the currency shortage had been resolved.(7)
Source:
This situation illustrates the fact that the Canadian population, as a whole, is very ill-prepared in case of an eventual bank panic or, more likely, a period of sharp price increases. There does not seem to be any contingency plan in place for most people if things were to go sour even for a short period of time.
Source:
Eminent monetary historian of economics Elmus Wicker examines the events which spurred a series of banking panics beginning in 1893–94, that led to the creation of the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank twenty years later. A serious lacuna exists in the literature on the origins of the Federal Reserve System. What is absent is a fair appraisal of the role Senator Nelson Aldrich, prominent Rhode Island senator, played. Carter Glass captured the acclaim while asserting that Aldrich be granted equal billing with Glass as “fathers” of the Federal Reserve System.
Source:
MORE ABOUT
Bank Panic