Since this was happening to a lot of people, I added a few paragraphs to the blog post to help explain it: "One common experience for new players is they start

Since this was happening to a lot of people, I added a few paragraphs to the blog post to help explain it: "One common experience for new players is they start the game, prices creep down, one orchard goes bankrupt, then the other ones quickly fall like dominoes and unemployment goes to 100%. This dynamic is exaggerated in SimCB. What happens is that when an orchard goes bankrupt, that's ten percent of the economy going offline. Not only that but if that business had loans, those loans get reversed by a negative dividend imposed on people. In a real economy this would happen through banks or other lenders who would be forced to take the hit (since you can't default on the central bank). In any case this results in an instant shrinking of the money supply. The negative dividend acts like a one time tax, people have less money in their bank accounts, spend less on apples, prices drop quickly which makes the other businesses less profitable and go bankrupt. In a real economy, usually not 10% of businesses would go down in one go and the central bank would have more time to react. Governments might also take on debt, implement bailouts etc. to help smooth out the situation. I could have implemented some kind of automatic government stabilizer. Or I could have made an economy with a hundred businesses instead of ten, so that these effects were more gradual. Some things to maybe try in future versions. "