Some you can see why people would be fooled. “We see various types of forged bills…Some are fairly sophisticated, and some are not. In 1984, for example, a group called the Choice-in-Currency Commission proposed that gold coins should compete with “the Federal Reserve System’s monopoly money.” Here, monopoly money may have additionally referred to the monopolistic and capitalistic needs to win the board game. Several writers addressed the perceived weaknesses of monopoly money in the 1980s. Congress during hearings for the Banking Act of 1935, which restructured the governance of the Federal Reserve. Monopoly money in this sense was a point of contention discussed by the U.S. Monopoly money has also been used to refer to currency issued by a government as early as 1915, when Alfred and Maud Westrup contrasted monopoly money with a plan by landowners to issue their own currency. The phrase Monopoly money has other, unrelated, uses which predate the board game and which are worth noting here.Īs early as 1901, monopoly money was used to describe money made and held by actual monopolists. In colloquial speech and writing, counterfeit money is sometimes called Monopoly money for rhetorical effect to indicate its worthlessness, and, in the case of poor counterfeits, its fake appearance. Moneybags as a bank teller, invoked Monopoly money to describe the look and feel of the newly revamped twenty-dollar bill. In 1998, a New Yorker cartoon, featuring the Monopoly mascot Mr. The term was used again in a Congressional hearing in 1976, this time to describe the scrip used for the food-stamps welfare program. The witness invoked the game, suggesting that the money was thrown around “ indiscriminately” like play money. House of Representatives claimed that the record company BMI was handing out Monopoly money to get airplay. During 1958 hearings about payola, a bribery scheme between music publishers and radio stations, a witness before the U.S. The 1949 book Grandparents Go Abroad compared the German Deutsche Mark to Monopoly money in look and feel. It could also refer to scrip, vouchers, or other tokens that only have value in certain limited circumstances. That could mean money with real value that looks or feels strange physically, like the multi-colored, thin paper bills from the game. As the game Monopoly gained popularity, people began to use Monopoly money to describe money that in some way resembled the fake money from the game.

Monopoly game