We had someone from a local bank come in to our High School &quot;Career and Life Management&quot; class. Half the class was assigned a script and had to go looking for loans. The other half was given fake money to open a bank and give out loans.<p>My group struggled to attract people while paying out reasonable interest rates. All the other banks were giving better offers. To actually make a deal, we ended up having to accept uncomfortably risky sounding customers at razor-thin margins.<p>When the time came, we looked on the back of the customer cards and discovered that thankfully they were not all as risky as we feared. We rolled the dice, but unfortunately rolled poorly and had a partial default by one of our borrowers.<p>We were a little unlucky. Without that default we&#x27;d have turned a profit, and most groups didn&#x27;t have a single default. In the end, we suffered a moderate net loss.<p>However, not a single group made a profit. All our competitors were giving out loans at a loss after accounting for inflation.<p>The lesson was supposed to be about banking and interest. Instead, it was a lesson on business. I&#x27;d never realised quite how destructive idiots with money could be.