The Emergency Loan category is the one category for which you should always earn 100 points.

• 100 points — No emergency loan
• 50 points — Emergency loans to $5 million
• 20 points — Emergency loans to $10 million

In the real world emergency loans do not exist. When you run out of cash, you have "a liquidity crisis", "Chapter 11", or simply "Bankruptcy" on your hands. Capstone^® gives you every benefit of a doubt, and every opportunity to come up with the money to pay your bills, but if you are out of cash on December 31st, "Big Al" arrives to give you just enough cash to bail you out and bring the Cash account to zero.

Emergency loans are closely linked to your working capital policy and forecasting abilities. Most loans are rooted in two mistakes:

• An unexpected and dramatic expansion in inventory;
  
• Funding plant expansion with "excess" working capital. Or worse, forgetting to fund the plant improvements at all.

One can argue that the Emergency Loan category should offer nothing for small emergency loans. After all, if your heart stops beating, blood stops flowing, and you are dead. If Cash no longer flows through your company, it is dead, too.

Still, there are degrees of being dead, as when you compare, say, steak with hamburger.

At $5 million, your corpse is still recognizable, and we award you 50 points.

Up to $10 million, the odor is obnoxious, but we hold our noses and award you 20 points.

Beyond $10 million you have achieved the status of a rotting corpse, and you are awarded no points.