# If Fight Club's ending happened for real **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [May 18, 2013, 12:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-fight-clubs-ending-happened-for-real/658643 "2013-05-18T00:36:37Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 3\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Unintentionally\_Blank](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/unintentionally_blank/32/5418_2.png) [@Unintentionally\_Blank](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Unintentionally_Blank)\ **Post date:** [May 18, 2013, 8:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-fight-clubs-ending-happened-for-real/658643/21 "2013-05-18T20:31:42Z")
> [@Martin\_Hyde](#): > > Not really no. Fight Club’s terrorism was not realistically going to destroy people’s financial records in the 1990s either. Non-descript heavily protected buildings spread throughout innocuous parts of the country have been a core part of backup/disaster recovery type planning since at least the 80s. Banks were one of the first entities to heavily computerize so they are actually more likely than most corporations to have been ahead of the curve. Now, if you have a small community bank with a single building and say, under $10m in total deposits and they hold your mortgage and you blew up their building in the 1990s–there is some non-zero chance maybe they lose a bunch of records forever. But a lot of times they could still find ways to reconstruct it, like most places I’m aware of mortgage information is usually part of the dataset pertaining to properties for tax purposes. One of the local counties around here, you can search for all tax lots by address or owner name and it shows the value the house was sold for, the bank that holds the mortgage, the amount of the assessment, the taxes per year etc. I’m not talking about the Fight Club scenario, there was a company that resided in one tower, and had their backups in the other tower. I don’t recall the type of company it was, and from my experience, just because a company SHOULD do something, it doesn’t mean they DO it. ---
**Author:** ![billfish678](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7bcc69/32.png) [@billfish678](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/billfish678)\ **Post date:** [May 18, 2013, 8:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-fight-clubs-ending-happened-for-real/658643/22 "2013-05-18T20:50:53Z")
I think you guys need to quite fighting the hypothetical. What if destroying the financial records DID work? What if it was just one large company? A few of em. A bunch of em? Every single record of people loaning/owing somebody else money? How would those go down? I think that is what the OP is really interested in. ---
**Author:** ![Lumpy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lumpy/32/446_2.png) [@Lumpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lumpy)\ **Post date:** [May 18, 2013, 9:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-fight-clubs-ending-happened-for-real/658643/23 "2013-05-18T21:09:03Z")
> [@billfish678](#): > > I think you guys need to quite fighting the hypothetical. > > What if destroying the financial records DID work? What if it was just one large company? A few of em. A bunch of em? Every single record of people loaning/owing somebody else money? How would those go down? > > I think that is what the OP is really interested in. The economy would more or less collapse, since the entire system is built around keeping the debt of money owed constantly flowing like a giant game of musical chairs or hot potato. Once the institutions that lost the records defaulted on their debts, and the institutions that were expecting to receive money from them defaulted on their debts, etc. it would make the housing bubble look like a hiccup. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-fight-clubs-ending-happened-for-real/658643.md?page=1)