Being a bit early for an appointment yesterday, I ducked into a secondhand bookshop and emerged with a history of Countrywide Bank (by Tony Farrington, published in 1997), to add to my pile of histories of New Zealand financial institutions and major corporates. For younger readers, perhaps unfamiliar with the name, Countrywide grew up from the building society movement, became a bank in the late 1980s after deregulation, and was taken over by the National Bank (itself later taken over by ANZ) in the late 1990s.
As I idly flicked through the book, I came across the account of one of those little episodes in financial history that (as far as I know) are not that well documented: the run on the building society, in April 1985. Literal physical retail bank runs – people queuing in bank branches and out onto the street – just aren’t that common. …
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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