Monopoly Explains it All

The board game Monopoly was all the rage during the Great Depression, writes Tim Hartford in The Washington Post. He finds it an apt symbol for our present pickle.

Loose money. Monopoly games start swimming in money, which is briefly mopped up as the players buy everything in sight. But then money starts to flood the system again….

Vague and constantly-changing rules. Most enterprising kids treat Monopoly the way enterprising investment bankers treat the financial system, quickly making up their own rules and striking side-deals insuring each other against catastrophe. These side-deals now add up to a nerve-wracking $596 trillion, more than forty times the size of the US economy. ***

The endgame. For all Monopoly’s merits, fans complain about the way it tends to end in a slow capitulation, one player after another dropping out as ever greater sums of money slosh around unpredictably between an ever smaller group of people. Remind you of anything?