You should consider another option not possible in Monopoly: what if 25% of the properties are removed from the playing board?
For a concrete example, consider the debate over what caused the recent spike in vehicle fuel prices. Was it the Fed's QE policy? Was it a spike in demand by consumers? Was it a deliberate reduction in supply by the crude oil producers and refinery operators?
For the third option, note that in 2015 the US government lifted the ban on the export of crude oil from the United States. In 2020, several major refineries were closed down. As a result more crude oil (produced by fracking) is being exported to global markets, and less gasoline is being refined in the US. This is a pretty good explanation for the spike in gas prices. This view is loudly condemned by the corporate media, Wall Street, and the fossil fuel corporations... for reasons that should be obvious. They'll instead try to blame restrictions on the import of dirty Canadian tar sands oil for the rise in prices, while deliberately ignoring the 2015 crude oil export law and the refinery closures.
How correlated is the rise in US gas prices with the rise in commodity oil prices? If the US gas price rose independently of international crude prices then I think you'd have a point. I don't know, I'm just curious.
I seem to remember hearing that a lot of US crude production went offline during 2020 because the falling price of oil made it uneconomical. With the rise in crude prices, maybe it's back now, but I don't know if production can scale as quickly as oil prices. In any case, I think it would be hard to argue that fed printing did not at least significantly contribute to the rise price of nearly every commodity.
It's very easy to argue that Fed QE (aka 'money printing') had nothing to do with current inflation, just look at when the QE boom began, i.e. right after the 2008-2009 subprime-mortgage-fraud-triggered collapse. Inflation wasn't an issue througout the decade after that, it wasn't even mentioned in the analysis of QE at the time (2014) [1] nor does it show up in the data until this year[2]:
So if the Fed dumping $4 trillion into the economy from 2009-2014 didn't jack up inflation then, what's the argument now? Sounds more like a basic supply and demand issue due to frail global supply chains, plus monopolistic price manipulation by centralized power in corporate America.
The intervention in 2008, printed asset money (not bank liability deposits as were given out recently), and crucially used it to buy a 4 trillion of bad loans from the Banking System, which were then placed in runoff (the Fed ended up making a small profit on this as it happens).
Think of it as deliberately creating a loop in the monetary system to get the loans away from the banks, where the losses would crash the banking system, and into a place where they could just be quietly allowed to drain off.
The money printing last year on the other hand, was a Weimar style directly into liability deposit accounts, and that has a much broader impact.
To be fair about the subtleties of all this - had the banking system still relied on the old reserve based regulation as used in the 1920´s, 2008 would have triggered a hyperinflation - but as Basel capital regulation now also controls the system, that intervened to prevent a monetary spiral with more lending creation more (deposit) money.
Perhaps Fed QE, with artificial suppression of lending rates(if I understand it correctly), was akin to leaving kindling around, but without the spark of a global supply panic, there wasn't a sure bet for traders to leverage. Once it seemed clear that prices were heading upwards due to supply shocks, it was a no-brainer to use the cheap money and drive up the prices of assets even further.
I'd also add that the helicopter stimulus from the government probably helped goose asset prices as well.
I don't know... if you listen to some folks, QE is deflationary because it traps money in the financial system. I'll say that I personally pulled most of my money out of the market in late 2019 because I already thought we were due for a correction. It seemed like, while it took a few years, asset prices were already climbing before COVID hit. The lack of inflation could be explained by increasing globalization and overall anemic economic growth(which is one piece of evidence used by the "QE is deflationary" crowd).
For a concrete example, consider the debate over what caused the recent spike in vehicle fuel prices. Was it the Fed's QE policy? Was it a spike in demand by consumers? Was it a deliberate reduction in supply by the crude oil producers and refinery operators?
For the third option, note that in 2015 the US government lifted the ban on the export of crude oil from the United States. In 2020, several major refineries were closed down. As a result more crude oil (produced by fracking) is being exported to global markets, and less gasoline is being refined in the US. This is a pretty good explanation for the spike in gas prices. This view is loudly condemned by the corporate media, Wall Street, and the fossil fuel corporations... for reasons that should be obvious. They'll instead try to blame restrictions on the import of dirty Canadian tar sands oil for the rise in prices, while deliberately ignoring the 2015 crude oil export law and the refinery closures.