I had this shower thought yesterday about how it's a bit absurd to rob a bank if you want to steal its fortune.

We have this cartoon stereotype of banks, which display bankers as these super rich people that sit on a big pile of cash (ideally overweight guys with a moustache, suit and cigar). It seems like you could just take the cash if you find a way to get to it.

But banks do fractional reserve banking, they make loans and invest money. At every point in time, the amount of cash in the bank is only a small fraction of the bank's wealth. If you're trying to rob a bank, you're not getting their fortune, you're getting the fraction of cash they have to keep to make sure the system is running. This fraction is an insurance and its value is arguably more important for the bank users than the bankers.

The real fortune of the bank is in circulation and comes back only occasionally with payments of loans. In other words, most of the bank's wealth is its debtors.

If you truly wanted to rob the bank off of its fortune, you'd have to steal their accounting books. However, those are worthless to you, because once you do that, debtors won't magically start paying you instead of the bank.

This means, funnily enough, that you can't really rob a bank to take its fortune. It's impossible because that wealth is not transferable this way.

I think that's a pretty funny observation.