At first, it looked to me like you could barely influence the economy. But a couple of runs later, I found wildly different results (e.g. having hyperinflation and huge economic crisis) depending on what I'd do.
Since the income from the central bank's interest is paid out to the people (and vice versa, negative interest will be passed as debt), the challenge seems like finding the correct ratio to increase GDP: inflation and interest income. New money is only generated through loans, so if I understand this correctly, one should strive to have high interest rates?
edit: After tweaking my strategy a bit to try to keep interest rates as high as possible without closing any business, I got to 443647.
If you keep inflation low and steady you can get higher scores from reducing menu costs. I can get around 446k by trying to keep it around 1%. Note that it gets more difficult to keep steady when you keep it lower.
I tried setting interest rates to 20% for the whole game, with... interesting results.
Inflation rised steadily as people ate all the apples in the market.
At the beginning it looked like inflation would never stop, but at some point an orchard managed to become profitable, becoming crazy rich ($22000) because apple prices were at $100. This made apple prices crash, going down to $0.02. This pattern repeated itself a few times.
The model they use in the simulation is a bit weird.
In reality, keeping a steady nominal GDP is a good idea. In fact, adopting a nominal GDP level target will make the market help you keep things steady. (By anticipating your central bank actions.)
The game moved way too fast for me, perhaps I did something wrong. Is there a way to make it turn-based and only advance when you tell it to?
Btw, the 'magic' of a nominal gdp level target isn't just in the stable gdp itself, but in announcing a target, so that economic actors can profit by anticipating the actions of the central bank. And that anticipation itself stabilises the economy already.
Yeah expectations are definitely a tricky part of economics and so not knowing how to model them very finely, I had to keep things simple. I tried to integrate a kind of extrapolative expectations with regards to inflation using a linear regression over a rather long period to simulate the expectations being "anchored" and "smoothed".
It might be interesting to allow the expected trend to be changed by announcements and such as you suggested.
Since the income from the central bank's interest is paid out to the people (and vice versa, negative interest will be passed as debt), the challenge seems like finding the correct ratio to increase GDP: inflation and interest income. New money is only generated through loans, so if I understand this correctly, one should strive to have high interest rates?
edit: After tweaking my strategy a bit to try to keep interest rates as high as possible without closing any business, I got to 443647.
edit: up to 444823