To the Editor:

There is a new board game in Goffstown stores that is getting a lot of attention.  It is called the FRAMEGame and it is very similar to and is an upgrade to the familiar board game named Monopoly that has been popular for a very long time.

Perhaps many older people remember that the Monopoly game was about acquiring property. If your board piece happened to land on a board square named “Park Avenue Hotel”, then that hotel could be bought. Basically the object of the game was to buy as many properties as possible, certainly more than the opposing players.

The player who ended up owning “everything” won the game, which could take many hours or days to complete. Monopoly had its little pitfalls as some of the squares had penalties that would cost the players some money and it was just part of the game. 
There was also a limit to the amount of money available to play the game.

To play Monopoly, a player was first chosen to be the banker to give out, change and collect the cash. Then the players take turns “rolling the dice”, moving their pieces across the board squares and buying and selling properties to each other. The players all start with equal amounts of cash and at the end of the game only one player has all the cash and properties. The newer version of Monopoly (FRAMEGame) has some brilliant innovations that are very interesting and make the game much more challenging. 

1. Players don’t need cash (Monopoly Money)! Cash is created by the act of borrowing!  In FRAMEGame, no player starts with any cash at all! When a player’s piece lands on “Park Avenue Hotel’, the player goes to the “bank” and asks for a loan. The “bank” simply writes a virtual check for the amount of the loan. And it gets even simpler than that. The bank doesn’t really have any cash either! It just has “virtual” deposits.” 
   
   When any player takes out a loan and gets a check, the check then becomes the “cash.” When the “check” is given to the seller (another player), the seller naturally “deposits” it back into the bank to be used later. Then there is the next brilliant FRAMEGame innovation that allows the bank to expand its money supply. 
   
2. The miracle of “double-entry bookkeeping”.  The bank takes the checking deposit (really a bank “Liability” because it could be “withdrawn” from the bank at any time) and also enters it as a bank Asset ready to be loaned out again and again. This process is repeated, as many times as there are properties to be bought. Real money isn’t necessary in this game because the money is just “virtual money” anyway - a series of computer keystroke entries to record the transactions.
   
   There is another brilliant FRAMEGame innovation:
   
3. The “fractional reserve multiplier effect".  This allows for the virtually unlimited creation of “virtual money” to be used to buy properties.

The acronym “FRAME” stands for FRActional Multiplier Effect and is a European banking innovation from hundreds of years ago. It is used in the Western world (not the Eastern world – it is called “Usury” and it is forbidden) to create “money from nothing.” This is in contrast to having to work and produce goods or services to earn some money. Some people do actually have to work and what money is actually supposed to represent. 

What the FRActional Multiplier Effect means is that a bank only has to keep a small fraction of any deposit in the bank. The rest of any deposit can be loaned out again and again using the same process of converting a liability into an asset with a keystroke. 

This “fractional reserve requirement” is in contrast to a 100% reserve requirement that would prohibit a bank from “loaning out” even a single customer’s deposit. There are distinct banking advantages to being able “to expand the money supply” endlessly.

At a 10% reserve requirement, the bank can “multiply” the original loan by a factor of 9. So an original loan of $100,000 can be “multiplied” to almost an additional $900,000, as an example. This ability to “create money from nothing” has other advantages.

The bank charges interest on each loan. So the original loan of, say, $100,000 at 6% becomes an additional 9 times 6% for each new loan of money that was created from just a single original deposit. Each new loan gets re-deposited in the bank for more loans.

The FRAMEGame player who gets selected as the “banker” would accumulate “money” from the interest charges, so “banker” would be a desirable “FRAMEGame” position.

However, the best strategy to make money in this game is to be the first player to borrow as much as possible because that devalues the existing money in the game and raises the property prices for any subsequent future buyers through the process of “inflation.”

The FRAMEGame comes with a little calculator that automatically keeps track of the increase in money supply (monetary inflation) and the resulting rise in property prices (price inflation) that are really the end game and goal of the FRAMEGame. 

Of course the FRAMEGame has some pitfalls on the board squares that could cause some players to have to default on their loans and lose their Park Avenue Hotel. This could cause a cascading effect of deflation, lower property prices and a total loss of money.

The opposing forces of deflation and inflation are what make FRAMEGame interesting.

A FRAMEGame option is always to take the money, run and look for the next game in town. There will always be a “next game in town.” Some bankster will create it for sure!

I just thought that you had a “Right to Know (R2K).

Ivan Beliveau
Goffstown