Monopoly Money

Larry Doyle thinks he's joking:

That's when the bankers and the C.E.O.s all disappeared into that underground paradise they've been building since the eighties; that's when women's skin started falling off; that's when the Treasury Department, in a last-ditch effort to solve the financial crisis, certified all Monopoly and other board-game moneys...

Hm. People have been wondering what the best way, in practice, of dropping money from a helicopter might be. To within an order of magnitude, I reckon that certifying all Monopoly money would constitute an immediate liquidity injection of about $1 trillion, or 66 million extant US sets, based on total historical worldwide sales of 200 million games.

And Hasbro wouldn't even need to change anything! They conveniently switched to a new set of currency in September; only the old notes would be certified.

You can only imagine the frantic searching through dusty attics. And the way that all of us, pace Jay-Z, could suddenly "play Monopoly with real cash". At least until we took our moldering board games straight to the nearest bank. And discovered that the owners had all taken off to their secret underground paradise.