The Global Credit Crunch and MMORPGS

This week central banks around the world injected billions of dollars into their financial systems to ease the credit crunch. Stories like this really makes me feel like I am living in a virtual world. In any MMORPG, the administrators have the power to create as much money as they want and “inject” the assets into the world. They can also create items and put them into the world. The items then get traded by players. This is practically what happened here in the real world. Many homes were created on the basis of non-existent money, and then the non-existent returns got sold all around the world. When the world realized that all of these assets are essentially virtual, the powers that be created more fictitious currency and lent it out to its minions to balance out the economy. Since our currency system is decoupled from the gold standard, there is no real world item that ties to our money. Essentially our money is as digital and virtual as the money in a game. In games there are designers and QA engineers that work on the balance of the economy and sometimes they do catastrophic things to the worlds to make the gameplay more interesting. There are also times when the original design is flawed, and balance needs to be brought to the world through patches. So what are the central banks doing exactly in our world by lending out more money? I think they’re trying to restore balance, but are they ultimately fixing the bugs in the system or just applying a workaround? Real life is the ultimate MMORPG with 6 billion players world wide, but who are the ones pulling the strings?

Share This

Related Posts