I went to three diffrent banks near my work and asked them what there Y2K preperations were .

They all asured me that they were all going to be ok , and that they had all happend to have a new directive from there vice presidents who are in charge of there Y2K up grades,To enform me the" dumb public" that they were taking care of everything . I did happen to ask them what did they do to fix there situations , and the only responce that I got was that I was the only one who had ever brought up this subject and that I was Getting all worked up over nothing .

Am i the only one that is real scared about the way that a lot of people are taking this ???

-- Ronald C Cash (rjcash@fred.net), May 03, 1998

Answers

I had a similar experience at my bank (Suntrust--a sizeable institution.) I asked, and the manager informed me that the bank already had resolved their Y2k remediations. She made this statement as she unrapped a new set of Bank promo flyers regarding the year 2000 transition. I debated this point and I took one to read later. When I had a chance to look, the flyer was a statment from upper management regarding the seriousness of Y2K and an assurance that they would be doing their best efforts to be fully compliant by late '99. The whole experience indicates to me that most of the world is totally clueless, including a not to distant link in a large financial institutions chain. When mass society catches a whiff of y2k smoke, someones gonna yell fire, and theres gonna be a stampede.

-- lou (theknowzone@mindspring.com), May 03, 1998.

My bank said not to worry either. So did the electrice company. A politician told me that our village has nothing to worry about becasue it does not use mainframe computers. A computer consultant at the newspaper where I work told me that Y2K is only a "Microsoft Windows Problem." After hearing all this, I cleaned out our savings and checking to the bare minimun. Bought a generator, started stashing food, water and other supplies.

-- Gail (gmt@students.wisc.edu), May 04, 1998.

You hear economists talk about the money supply and different ways to measure it (M1, M2, M3 etc) a lot. But you don't hear much about the CASH supply. An article a couple of years ago caught my eye- you can find it on the web at http://www.around.com/money.html, or in the New York Times Magazine, June 16, 1996 ("Dead as a Dollar" by J. Gleick). I snipped and pasted a piece below, the most important part. These are things to think about well before 1999. Many thanks to the authors for a level-headed and thoughtful analysis of the problem.

LPL ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ In fact, of the broad American money supply, only a small fraction -- less than one-tenth -- exists in the form of currency. All the bills and coins in consumer pockets, bank vaults and elsewhere amount to about $400 billion. And most of that currency, as much as two-thirds, has long since departed the country, probably forever, mainly in the form of $100 bills. They belong to overseas money launderers and other enterprises that for one reason or another prefer not to keep their wealth in local denominations and local banks.

The vast daily traffic in money across the interbank network is not backed by dollar bills. Nor of course is it backed by the stores of gold at Fort Knox and elsewhere, the gold standard having long since gone the way of ducats and pieces of eight. "Money is the current liability of a bank," asserts Sholom Rosen, Citibank's electronic-cash guru. "It's as simple as that: it's not gold, it's not silver, it's the current liability of a bank."

You believe in banks, don't you? That's good, because ultimately money is backed by nothing but your own confidence, habit, and faith -- a form of faith as powerful and essential to modern life as any religious belief. The coming digital era will make this plain to everyone, as never before. Still, the stock of old-fashioned cash out there is growing, not shrinking. About $1,400 in bills exists somewhere for every American.

-- Lee P. Lapin (lplapin@hotmail.com), May 06, 1998.

I had a bank teller tell me at Washingtom Mutual that thjey had it fixed two years ago! Lies, lies, lies and liers! What else can they say? Don't believe a word of what the Banks tell you! They have to lie to you, otherwise they would cause a panic!

-- Eddie Pons (ponski@soft-link.com), May 07, 1998.

Here is a true story from a Y2k conference in Portland Oregon held on May 4, 1998. An elderly woman drew $200,000 in cash out of a bank recently and was asked by the bank manager "Why are you drawing out your money?" She said "My daughter is a Y2k programmer specializing in banks and she told me to widthdraw all my money". Rather than listening to the executives of banks we need to listen to the Y2k programmers at the banks in order to get the truth.

-- Del Ball (dball@sales-tools.com), May 08, 1998.