The Weekend

It is 6pm on Friday and a hedge fund you have never heard of has just failed to meet a margin call. By Monday morning, when Tokyo opens, the financial system will either still be standing or it will not, and the person who decides which is you. On the wall is the whole system — twelve institutions and the exposures wiring them together. When one goes down, the damage travels the wires. You have sixty-two hours, a finite amount of public money and a much more finite amount of public patience, and every rescue you grant makes the next one cost more. Save the wrong things early and you will reach Sunday night unable to afford the one institution the system genuinely cannot lose. Somebody has to be allowed to fail. Choosing who is the job.

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System integrityThe weighted health of the whole network — this is what you're graded on. It falls as institutions fail and contagion spreads down the exposures. Zero is a systemic collapse and the weekend is over.

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Public fundsWhat you can still commit, in billions. Finite and non-renewable. Money spent on Friday's small problem is money you do not have on Sunday night.

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Political capitalYour mandate to keep acting. Rescues burn it; so do failures that cost jobs. Zero and you are removed in the middle of the night, with the weekend unfinished.

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Moral hazardWhat the market learns from you (lower is better). Every rescue teaches the next firm it will be caught — and the political price of each further rescue rises with it.

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Hours to TokyoHours until Asia opens and the decisions stop being yours. Every instrument costs some; forcing a merger costs a whole night. Run out and the rest of the weekend resolves without you.

Sixty-two hours to Tokyo's open. You cannot save everyone — and one of them you cannot lose.