Hello and welcome. You are listening to Patrick Boyle on Finance, a podcast exploring ideas from quantitative finance, examining events occurring in markets right now and financial history to see what lessons can be taken away, including interviews with some of the most interesting people in the world of finance. To learn more about the podcast, visit onfinance.org.

What would happen if a country's banking system shut down altogether? How much harm might it

cause to the economy? It's quite reasonable to guess that such an event would bring the economy

to a screeching halt. Today we're going to see what actually happened in Ireland in

1970 when all of the banks closed for over six months, only to find themselves quickly

and fairly seamlessly replaced by local pubs. We'll discuss if something like this could work

again and at the end of the video we'll compare how the system that emerged compares to more

modern ideas like cryptocurrencies. So between 1966 and 1976 there were three major

banking strikes in Ireland, in which all of the clearing banks

were closed.

The strike in 1970 was the longest of the three, where the banks were entirely closed for

six and a half months.

In the lead up to the strike, bank staff had been working short hours and a backlog in check

processing had built up.

Additionally, while the banks technically reopened in mid-November of 1970, it took them until

February of 1971 to process the backlog of checks and resume normal working hours.

So all in all, the banks in Ireland were either closed or offering severely reduced services

for almost an entire year.

Most economists would predict that in the scenario that Ireland faced in 1970, you'd

likely see a collapse in the money supply, a credit crunch, a trade implosion, mass

unemployment, a collapse in GDP and a return to

a system of barter. In fact, when the strike began some international newspapers at the time,

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