Ethos of The Bank

Day 2,369, 02:51 • Published in Ireland Ireland • by Sweet Drinker


Seems like a good time to explain some things about the Irish Bank.

Firstly: It's important to differentiate the Bank and the Treasury.
The Treasury is an erep game mechanic. Accessible only through the ingame power of Congressional Vote. It's function is to allow the current government to disseminate tax revenue through a very limited list of avenues.
The Treasury hardwired institution.

The Bank is an idea. It isn't tied to any ingame mechanic. It's not an Org, orgs are just a resource we designate to the Bank.
The Irish Bank is player(s). Voting for this authority takes place alongside the CP election, because the CP & MoF's have a shared interest in National Orgs.
We grant the MoF authority over our community's accumulated economic power.
Is that a lot of power? Yes it is.
We take Bank appointments very seriously.
The MoF's responsibility is not to the CP, it's to the community.

When you're dealing with large amounts of money, gauging net worth by total cc alone is not sufficient.
You must rate total worth by virtual cc,gold,Q7wpn values.

If you've got 1million in cc, and tomorrow gold prices double, you still have 1million cc, but you've lost 1/2 your power.
That's a serious error for a banker, our accumulated power should have been in gold.
If you've got 5,000g and tomorrow cc prices double, you still have 5k gold, but... you get the idea.
The object of the game is to keep all 3 virtual benchmarks as high as possible.

Once you start looking at wealth in this manner, you quickly start to divide everything going on in erep as threats & opportunities.
And you start to see the MoF's responsibility as fundamentally the movement of our accumulated power from one commodity to another.
They assess opportunities, weigh them against threats, and decide where our power should be.
While Orgs have their uses, they also have intrinsic limitations, such as 1k max storage. Some of these limitations can be bypassed by incorporating player accounts into the operation.
Some ppl have voiced concern over our accumulated power moving into player accounts recently. That's actually just one of the resources at the Bank's disposal.

The MoF must always regard the CP as a potential threat to our accumulated wealth. Game mechanics force it to be so.
Even well intentioned CP's can sometimes become overzealous spenders and start threatening our longterm wellbeing.
Having seen a CP spend 1/2million cc in the first 4 rounds of a single, clearly unwinnable campaign, I can attest to this.
Remember that CP's tend to concentrate on a great term, while MoF's tend to concentrate on a great era. 😉

Our current CP for all his charm, is a 5month old account. It'd be a foolish MoF who didn't rate his threat level to Orgs as high.
The Bank primarily uses Orgs to farm the monetary market. Currently MM return rates only add up to 3-4% gain per month. That is very low opportunity potential for Orgs.
It'd be a very poor call for our MoF to expose our accumulated power to a threat of 100% loss, for a potential 4% gain.

Recent events clearly illustrate the effectiveness of this mentality to our Bank.
Not only does it protect our assets, but it allows us to give opportunities to players that just wouldn't be possible.
It's highly unlikely we'd elect a 5month old account to CP without such safeguards in place.
Very few ppl would be acceptable CP candidates without the existence of our Bank's stability.



Some ppl will question the actions of our MoF over the last few months. But the fact of the matter is:
The Irish Ministry of Finance is working as intended.