The iconic, 91-year-old game Monopoly is the ultimate refresher course for economic lessons we forgot or never learned. Owned by the American toy company Hasbro, Monopoly is licensed to 113 countries and printed in 46 languages around the globe. Its popularity derives from creating vivid, universally valid experiences of how the zero-sum game financial economy–the economy that lacks organized credit markets–ruins lives.
How I Used Monopoly To Teach About The Zero-Sum Game Financial Economy Behind The Global Financial Crisis
In spring of 2009, when the world was still in shock over the Global Financial Crisis, I had been teaching structured finance to graduate students in Hong Kong several years running. That year, my students urgently wanted to know “what those bad actors did.”
To create that firsthand experience for them, I designed their final exam around playing winner-take-all Monopoly. I divided my students into groups of 4-5 players and encouraged them to stay on to the bitter end; to find out the secrets of winning Monopoly; and to develop enough material to write a final paper on Monopoly’s relevance to the GFC.
They put their hearts into the assignment, and the papers were a joy to read. The key themes boiled down to these three:
- PLAYING MONOPOLY IS ITS OWN FINANCIAL EDUCATION: My students were genuinely surprised at how relevant the techniques of analysis were that they’d learned in their classes to making decisions in the game: discounting, probability, capital structure. But the capital market products courses they’d taken did not seem useful at all in a simulated economy that does not create new money or recycle it in new forms.
- SHOCK, HORROR, GOOD PEOPLE DO BAD THINGS: Their classmates, and sometimes they, cut side deals and broke promises to get a deal done. It was a revelation that character and morality can be so situational even when it’s only a game! Some astutely noted how, in a world without enforceable contracts, there is more upside than downside to breaking a promise.
- A MARKET WITHOUT CREDIT IS A CRUEL MARKET: They saw Monopoly as a simulated asset-based economy with no labor market or reinvestment in new businesses, only hoarding and rent-seeking on a shrinking pool of assets available for ownership, where the winners were the first to grasp the dog-eat-dog nature of the zero-sum game financial economy.
The New “Monopoly App Banking” Is Keeping Pace With Market Change
This January, Hasbro announced a new game version with radical changes, called Monopoly App Banking, which is expected to retail in August 2025.
Boardwalk and Park Place, traditionally the most expensive properties to buy and develop, will be replaced with Rocket Launch Pad and Moon. Paper money will disappear. Bankers will be made redundant.
Players choose their tokens and take a bank card with an initial credit balance in place of the cute pastel-colored bills. With each transaction, changes to their balances and property titles are scanned into an electronic central depository, Monopoly Money App, which updates players’ financial position in real-time.
As before, no new money is created when original savings are used up. This economy lacks deposit-taking banks for reinvesting idle savings. There are no new businesses to pay wages or bonuses, or reinvest in operations. Without money creation, players must extract rent from each other to survive.
As the available properties get bought up, players become more aggressive in seeking to own the board or be owned. The game ends as it always has, with all players but the winner in the hole.
The New Expansions Reflect The Expansion Of Zero-Sum Game Financial Thinking
Besides the new “fintech” interface, the new game version offers interesting expansions that allow players to “get away with mischief and unlock opportunities to buy every space on the board.” Free Parking becomes Monopoly Free Parking Jackpot Expansion. Monopoly Buy Everything Expansion opens the Safe Vault and puts everything up for sale. Go to Jail Expansion releases prisoners and lets them break queues or even steal property with impunity.
Early reviewers commented on how the revised game enhances user experience and speeds up the pace, which today can last hours or even days. Others lament that young people will lose the chance to build up fluid mental math skills while playing: develop number sense, compute sums and products, budget, compare value, think strategically or reason using simple probability.
While The Changes Track The Progression Of Our Credit Market Amnesia
The replacement of high-end properties mimics the ambitions of today’s tech titans to conquer outer space. Free Parking Expansion highlights the increased reliance of Americans on games of chance for wealth by those who can least afford to play them.
Monopoly Buy Everything Expansion is a new variable where, apparently “everything” can becomes available for resale. It looks like eminent domain, the right of government to seize private property. This was attempted in 2012, when the GFC San Bernardino County considered taking over distressed mortgages to prevent foreclosure by eminent domain. They were ultimately dissuaded by mortgage owners and housing authorities.
Go to Jail Expansion formalizes the role for corruption. It is not a new concept in gaming. “Corruption cards” have been used in shooter games since 2020. But it is new to Monopoly, an iconic financial game, and an ominous sign of where post-GFC market culture may be headed.
Monopoly Money App also simulates the rise of market opacity. By holding all the data on financial position and property title, players can no longer look around the table to assess their own relative financial position vis-à-vis others. This change parallels the very real loss of market transparency I wrote about in 2022 and 2023, as credit moves from public to private markets and out from under regulatory oversight.
Are these coincidental design choices? It seems they are not.
“Fixed-income markets used to be considered the savvy investor’s version of the smartest kid in the class” because they are nonlinear and mathematical; but no more, says The Street’s Martin Baccardax. The changes coming in the latest version of Monopoly reflect the further encroachment of the zero-sum game financial economy on our beleaguered credit markets.