Wall Street Raider

// mechanics · banking

Play as a bank, and learn the two ways one dies.

Almost no game lets you be the lender. It is a strange omission, because banking is the most legible risk system in finance: you borrow short, lend long, and the entire craft is surviving the gap. Here you charter one, run it, and discover that a bank can fail with a perfectly good loan book.

Chartering: a bank is a company first

You do not start a bank from a menu. You take control of a finance-industry company — buy it, build it, or win it in a takeover — and then charter it as a lender. That ordering matters, because the balance sheet you inherit is the balance sheet you start lending against.

Chartering is free, and so is inspecting the loan desk. The lending actions themselves are where the commitment begins.

Setting the risk appetite is the whole game

Once chartered, you set lending policy. The core dial is risk appetite, and it is a genuine trade rather than a difficulty slider:

Policy	You get	You accept
Conservative	Low charge-offs, a book that survives a downturn, stable capital	Thin margin over funding cost; slow growth; rivals outgrow you in good years
Balanced	Reasonable spread, manageable provisioning	Vulnerable to a sharp sector-specific shock
Aggressive	Wide spread over the curve, fast book growth, excellent earnings in an expansion	Provisioning that eats the extra margin the moment credit turns; concentrated exposure

Alongside it sit the margin you charge over the prevailing curve and the covenant tightness you demand. Charge too much and borrowers go elsewhere. Charge too little and you are taking credit risk for free — which is exactly how real lenders get into trouble, and it is modelled the same way here.

Provisioning: the loss you book before it happens

This is the mechanic most people have never seen in a game. When you originate a loan, you do not simply book the interest as profit. You must also set aside an allowance for credit losses (ACL) — an estimate of what that book will eventually not repay — and that allowance is an immediate charge against earnings.

Consequences that follow directly from that:

• Growth is expensive up front. A quarter of aggressive origination can show worse earnings than a quiet one, because you provisioned against everything you just wrote.
• Credit quality changes the allowance, not just the outcome. As borrowers deteriorate, the required allowance rises, and the top-up is another charge — before a single loan has actually defaulted.
• Releases flow back. When a book performs better than provisioned, the excess allowance is released back into earnings. This is why bank profits look volatile in a recovery.
• Workouts are a decision. Distressed credits can be worked out rather than written off, which trades recovery value against time and further provisioning.

Death one: capital insolvency

Losses eat equity. Your capital ratio — regulatory capital measured against the risk in your book — is the number that determines whether you are still a going concern. Push it below the requirement and you are insolvent regardless of how much cash sits in the till.

Capital adequacy also gates what you are allowed to do. A thinly capitalised bank cannot buy back its own stock, pay a special dividend, recapitalise on favourable terms, pay out a CEO bonus, or spin off a subsidiary. Those actions are blocked at the capital test, not merely discouraged. The escape route out of a hole is closed precisely when you are in one, which is the point.

Death two: the deposit run

This is the failure mode that surprises people, and it is the reason the liquidity position deserves as much attention as the capital ratio. Holding more liquid assets costs you yield in every quarter that nothing goes wrong. That is the trade, and it is the same one real treasurers make.

Losing the charter without failing

One more path worth knowing: the charter belongs to the company, not to you. If the bank you control gets acquired, delisted, or otherwise leaves your control, the loan book does not linger in limbo — the charter is swept and the book resolves. You cannot keep operating a lender you no longer own.

What is deliberately simplified

• One capital measure. Real supervision runs several ratios at once — CET1, tier 1, total capital, leverage ratio, plus buffers. The engine models a single coherent capital adequacy test with the same gating behaviour.
• No central bank facility. There is no lender of last resort to discount your assets in a run. Liquidity is what you actually hold.
• No deposit insurance. Depositor behaviour responds to the bank's condition without the dampening a guarantee scheme would provide, which makes runs sharper than they usually are in a modern insured system.
• Loan types are grouped. Origination is by borrower quality and sector rather than by individually negotiated facility.