Bank Run

Historically, in a run on the bank or bank run, a widespread rumour that a retail banking institution lacks the liquidity to pay all of its depositors causes large numbers of clients to all attempt to withdraw their funds at once out of fear of losing everything. As banking is based on a fractional reserve system, where an institution holds only a small percentage of its assets under management in cash in order to lend or invest the rest, the rumour that starts the bank run effectively becomes a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy – even if the institution was originally stable, enough clients frantically withdrawing everything at once will break the bank. This was very common during the Great Depression of the 1930s, but there are certainly more recent examples, such as the collapse of the Northern Rock in the UK during the Great Recession of 2008-2009.

In fiction, a government bank inspector can usually be counted upon to show up at the worst possible moment, forcing the directors of the failing bank to explain the lack of funds – or even threaten the management with prison time by claiming the problems were caused by embezzlement of the bank's funds by insiders.

In practice, governments today usually step in to provide deposit insurance or lend money to keep a failing institution able to meet obligations until it can be quietly merged into another, more solvent firm. This is nominally intended to prevent insolvency at one firm from escalating in such a way as to drag counterparties into bankruptcy or breaking the system as a whole.

That doesn't mean that bank runs can't still happen in real life, and it certainly doesn't prevent them from being a recurring trope in fiction. The long line of panicked depositors snaking out of the bank and around the block creates dramatic tension which renders the underlying complex financial concepts simple and black-and-white in an easily understandable form.

Film

 * American Madness (1932)
 * It's a Wonderful Life (1946): The Bailey Building and Loan is a target for this, largely for the benefit of an unethical competitor.
 * Mary Poppins (1964)
 * Noble House (1988)
 * The Pope Must Die (1991)

Literature

 * The Jungle (Upton Sinclair): A run on a bank is one of many causes of the characters' suffering.
 * The Moneychangers (Arthur Hailey) includes a potentially fatal run on a fictional US bank, as well as a trusted employee being caught for embezzlement.

Theatre

 * Panic (Archibald MacLeish, 1935) depicts the bank panic of 1933.