"Thoughts?" you asked. You outline the exact scenario that lead to the historic crashes of the different banking systems throughout US history, i.e. people went to get their money due to growing mistrust, and of course each bank only had so much cash at any one time, which resulted in the inability to honor the withdrawal requests, which fueled more mistrust, even becoming distrust, which brought greater demands for cash withdrawals, etc. etc. etc.
We all know that history. Just remember that the last such major run on the banks in the US happened when there were gold certificates, and all notes were exchangeable on demand at the US Treasury into gold and/or silver.
Today, the issue is that the "middleman" is a paper tiger, the currency is not involved in the real value system, and the level of trust in the values of the metals is being manipulated, which is not surprising given the decades prior to 2007 during which gold/silver is/were black sheep in the language of the vast majority of the investment community. The management of the image is very long standing, but today it is requiring some very sizable paper liquidity risk to enforce.
All the same, when confidence in other value stores erodes, and confidence in the ability to make value withdrawals (i.e. obtain physical gold) erodes, then what is to stop a run on this bank? The crowd mentality is the same century after century.
