HIS financial institution was nearing collapse - at the very least that's what the stories had been saying - and his car was full of baggage bulging with cash.
20 years after Australia's last huge banking disaster, one of the then senior managers of a state financial institution that confronted a run on its deposits remembers the moment when prospects lost confidence and he and his colleagues had to hit the streets.
As reviews spread that the financial institution was struggling below the burden of losses from industrial property loans, there was a smattering of unusually giant withdrawals. This accelerated in a matter of days until tens of millions of dollars had been flying out the financial institution's doors. This compelled senior managers to take extraordinary measures to win again belief - and deposits - before the money ran out.
A bank run is a demise spiral that even the world's greatest wrestle to snap out of before regulators step in. In most international locations, few banks suffering a run will survive greater than five days. On the state bank's head workplace, 4 senior staffers drove as much as the loading dock and their cars have been stuffed with baggage of money.
They were sent out to the suburbs with directions to top up the funds of the branches struggling the heaviest withdrawals.
It was a warfare of economic attrition, with the hope that prospects would once more imagine there was greater than sufficient money to go around.
"You'd just drive round until you got the message with the name of the department the place to go," a kind of involved said.
All this was carried out below strict secrecy. Just a handful of the financial institution's managers knew of the rescue operation.
If word bought out, it threatened to shatter the very confidence it was attempting to restore. Even regulators weren't advised in regards to the money dumps.
"We drove back into head office a number of times a day and we would just load up the boot with tons of of hundreds of dollars," stated the person, who's now a senior government at a big four bank. "It was real - we have been proper in the middle of it."
The scars of this early 1990s banking disaster have been important in shaping a deeply conservative tradition amongst regulators and some senior bankers over the past two decades.
As we speak, that tradition is regarded as one of many predominant causes Australia has up to now escaped the worst of the disaster that continues to hobble most of the world's developed economies.
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