Loans and insurance companies content idea

1

Hi guys, I love Prosperous Universe – I’ve been waiting for a game like this for all my life! I’m sure more content regarding financial markets will come, but one relatively easy to implement would be to give players an option to start loan and insurance companies – backbone of economics. Loan companies would borrow money to other players with custom interest (it would be appreciated if we could do space usury business with 300% interest loans :> ), and insurance companies would be paid for insuring the loans. There would be a separate loan market, on which borrowers and loaners could make orders (and maybe haggle a bit?) and set repayment time and date. On the set time, the debt would be automatically transferred to the loaner.

In an unregulated loan market, the first concern of the lender is the repayment capabilities of the borrower. If the company who took the loan is insolvent/bankrupt at the time of repaying the debt, the loaner would receive only part of the money borrowed. This is where insurance companies come in. For a small custom percentage of the loan value, the insurer commits to pay for the losses (fully or partly). To ensure that we are borrowing to the right lender, we need to have an option to audit the borrowers financial information for both the insurance companies and loaners. I would recommend to allow the lenders to have access the income and balance statement of the borrowers, but not the financial overview or any other information. That would add more risk to the business and require actual skill of the lender/insurer in reading balance sheets instead of leaving everything to chance.

What do you guys think of this idea?
Would you like to give and take loans in PU?
Would you like to specialize in audit to make some money on the side as an insurer?

And totally unrelated, but wouldn’t you love to import APEX dashboards to Excel?? Or only me?

Cheers

2

Keep in mind that the intent is for all companies of all types to be player companies. With real life often causing players to go away unexpectedly and without remorse, insurance would be an extremely challenging prospect. It would have to be provided by the game system and not by players.

That said, having a forced dissolution process for loan default is also an aggressive and predatory practice that would make the game feel combative to newer/smaller companies. I agree though, there needs to be a method of repayment.

Perhaps an income tax that would take a portion of profits at the time of sale, like wage garnishment, would be a better system. In this way a player can still play and grow, and dissolution only occurs when a player is removed for non-activity anyway.

3

I agree that automatic repayment doesn’t seem to be in the spirit of PrUn. We don’t even have automatic payment for contracts right now. But I agree that adding the option to post money-for-money contracts to the LM’s seems like it should be fairly simple to deploy and would tremendously add to the game.

1 Like