JIM MANZI: “Trust me — you do not want to experience a full-scale bank run in contemporary America. I’m not sure how many people realize how close we were to the wheels coming off at about noon yesterday, as major commercial-paper processing banks like State Street lost 30% – 60% of their value in about 2 hours. Want evidence: When was the last time you heard of the U.S. government identifying a problem, developing a multi-hundred-billion-dollar program and announcing it within about 48 hours?”

Exacerbating the problem is that banks keep much less cash on hand than they used to — it’s a just-in-time delivery system, and their supplies would be quickly exhausted if people started withdrawing even moderately more cash than usual — just as gas stations in Knoxville and Nashville quickly ran out of gas when people started “topping up” tanks in response to reports of shortages. I hope that bank managers and the Fed are upping cash stocks with this in mind.