Crisis Committee Chair
The seat somebody occupies for a handful of weekends a century: deciding, in hours, which institutions the financial system is allowed to lose.
What the job actually is
This chair does not exist on any org chart. It is assembled at speed — a treasury, a central bank, a regulator and whoever else is on the call — when several institutions are failing at the same time and the ordinary machinery is too slow.
The work is triage under three simultaneous constraints. Public money is finite. Political authority is more finite still, and every rescue spends it. And the clock is absolute: whatever is unresolved when markets open resolves itself, badly. You cannot save everything, so the job is deciding what the system genuinely cannot lose — the payment and clearing infrastructure, usually — and letting the rest fail in a controlled way.
The trap is that rescuing is easy and cheap on Friday, when the problem is small and the public is not yet watching. Every one of those rescues raises the price of the next, so a committee that catches everything early arrives at the genuinely systemic failure with no money and no mandate.
The calls that define it
- Which institutions are systemic and which are merely large and loud
- The instrument — liquidity line, guarantee, forced merger, equity injection, or nothing
- Who is allowed to fail, and how publicly
- What to tell the country before the market opens
Improvised from existing offices — treasury secretary, central bank governor, lead regulator — acting on emergency powers that are questioned afterwards, at length, in public.
What you'd need to know
The concepts this chair runs on — each one links to a plain-English definition.
Sit in the chair
Reading about a job is the trailer. This simulation makes you do it — free, in the browser, nothing to install and nothing locked.