It seems like every household has at least one version of the board game Monopoly. Not only that but it seems like every year, Hasbro releases a new strange version of the game. Whether it is the Game of Thrones Monopoly or the Digital Monopoly or some other version, Hasbro knows how to milk the Monopoly cow. This brought me to a fun yet difficult question. Is there more Monopoly money printed each year than actual money? Read on to find out.
To be fair let’s compare Monopoly money with one the printing of notes in one country. As there is a reasonable amount of information about it and it is a well-known economy, let’s go with the USA. We will exclude coins too (since Monopoly doesn’t have coins).
A quick search on the internet shows it is not so easy to solve. There are numerous publications that claim there is more Monopoly money printed each year than US$ yet digging deeper it becomes clear that those claims are based on, well, nothing.
To find out the truth we will have to do our own digging. A quick look at the treasury website shows that the US treasury prints around US$2 trillion each year. Hasbro state that 250 million copies have been sold since they started in 1935. That works out at roughly 3 million each year. The current game has over $20,000 in each box. While that is a lot of money and a lot of boxes, the math doesn’t come close to the US treasury.
Hasbro at most is printing $70 million Monopoly dollars each year, this doesn’t come close to the US treasury. It makes sense too. While people play Monopoly often and either damage or lose notes forcing them to buy a new copy, in the real world old notes need to be recycled often. The US treasury is printing around US$900 million every day to keep up with a constant rate of the currency. US treasury 1, Monopoly 0.
