Frackin’ Reserve! A Fractional Reserve Banking Simulator

Ryan Smyth, Contributor
Activist Post

To help explain what the effects of fractional reserve banking are, and to illustrate just how evil it is, I’ve written a simple program that lets you simulate fractional reserve banking and the effects of compound interest.

The Frackin’ Reserve! program simulates what happens in fractional reserve banking, and lets you change the parameters for it. What this lets you do is simulate fractional reserve banking from a variety of perspectives, and see the results in real time.

It also lets you generate a report so you can view all the generated output in a linear time series of the iterations through fractional reserve banking. That was probably a mouthful, and may have sounded like so much balderdash to some people. But it will all become clearer later on, and in particular when I post a follow-up article about fractional reserve banking.

The 10 Second Summary
Download and run the program to play with the factors that make up fractional reserve banking. Change them to see what happens. As a bonus, you can also see how interest works.

Frackin’ Reserve! Program Requirements

Operating System: Windows XP / Vista / 7
.NET Framework: Requires .NET 4 (available free from Microsoft as a web installer here or stand alone installer here)

There are no other special requirements.

Downloading Frackin’ Reserve!
You can download Frackin’ Reserve as a stand alone program here, or download the complete source code here, and if the whole requirements thing scares you, then there’s an installer version here (includes source code) that will take care of all the requirements for you automatically.

Stand alone download here – Easiest and simplest. Just download and run.
Source code download here – For those that want to learn more or alter the program.
Installer download here – This is the easiest thing if you are not sure about the requirements – it also includes the source code.

FREEDOM: Frackin’ Reserve! is licensed under the GPLv3, so you are free to do with it whatever you wish as long as you pass on that same courtesy if you redistribute it. (Yay for freedom!) Feel free to share with whomever you like.

And here’s a screenshot:

Where you see “parameters”, you can change the values. So, in other words, you can change these:

Updating those parameters updates everything else automatically.

To view a time series of the iterations of the fractional reserve banking, simply click the “Show me in a table” button. Frackin’ Reserve will create an HTML page with a table for you, and open it in your default browser. This is a table made using the default parameters: