Open walkthrough · chapter 1 · level 3
Below is a real level from the course, not an illustration. Post the operation yourself, then read why each line appears on the balance sheet. Nothing to download, nowhere to sign in.
Your progress lives in the cloud: start on a phone, finish at a desk. Lose connection mid-level and the level still finishes — nothing you entered is lost, and it syncs the moment you are back.
Before the entry: assets 100 million — reserves at the central bank. Liabilities and equity 100 million — equity.
This is a real level from chapter 1 — not an illustration. The whole game looks like this.
On the left are assets, what the bank owns: a hundred million sitting in its account at the central bank. On the right are liabilities and equity, where that money came from: the owners put it in. The totals are equal, and that is not a coincidence — a balance sheet balances by construction.
An asset is somebody else's obligation to the bank. Irina owes a hundred million back, and the bank records that obligation among its assets. No money moved anywhere: a record of a debt appeared.
A liability is the bank's own obligation. Money in a customer's account is a debt of the bank to the customer: it must be handed over on demand. Having issued the loan, the bank credited the sum to the account — and owed Irina exactly as much.
The bank did not take money out of a vault and did not borrow it from a neighbor. It made two records, and a hundred million appeared in Irina's account that had not existed a second earlier. This is how money is created in a modern system — by a commercial bank's entry, not by a printing press.
Irina will spend the money and it will leave for another bank — settlement takes reserves, and the bank has a hundred million of them, not an endless supply. Add capital requirements and the liquidity ratio. Those limits are chapters 2 and 4; the mechanics are the same, only reality plays against you.
Loans create deposits. Not “the bank lends out other people's savings” — the bank makes a record, and it becomes money precisely because it is trusted. Everything else grows from here: bank runs, ratios, the central bank and crises.
The first chapters are free, with no sign-up and no card.