The Whipsaw

First run of stage 1. No cycle. Just a slow death, and a different reason every time. In the order they turned up:

1. household income at tick 0 = 2 113 210 against GDP 101 375
2. unemployment 5.7% → 54% in 50 ticks, stocks grow, prices fall
3. of 12 firms in an industry exactly 2 sell, the rest freeze forever
4. at tick 100 unemployment is 0%, then wages +0.75%/tick with no ceiling
5. firms with a zero plan never restart

Five seperate causes, one symptom. GDP slides, unemployment climbs to 70%, every single time.

Third one is the worst. I read “two clearing rounds” in §5.3 as “two sellers”. The spec says demand is summed over every seller. So ten firms out of twelve had no market access at all, and it looked exactly like a demand problem instead of me misreading a sentence.

Fifth is the classic. Plan updates by multiplication, zero is absorbing, 0 × (1 + anything) = 0, firm never wakes up again. Full accounts, no output.

All five fixed and it still slides: 127k → 4k over 2000 ticks. Sixth cause, not found yet.

Writing this down before I forget the actual lesson, which isn’t any of the five. Four of them looked identical from outside. The symptom does not point at the cause here, and without separate series on the money flows I can’t tell them apart at all.