In the US, the panic of 1907 included runs on banks; it was precipitated by the fact that banks did not have enough reserves to honor withdrawals. This suggests that banks had already started debasing the currency, potentially many decades earlier (even though they were still officially operating under a gold standard at that time). Antitrust laws only came into effect near the end of the 1800s as the result of an increasing number of monopolies. These trusts may have been a result of this debasement (why weren’t these laws necessary earlier?). Currency debasement and industry monopolies go hand-in-hand because it gives a handful of politically-connected people access to almost unlimited amounts of easy money; this access to easy money is what allows trusts to form. It is the source of their competitive advantage. You need to maintain a significant competitive advantage in order to maintain a market monopoly… In a fair playing field, such competitive advantages don’t exist since they can’t be maintained for very long; it’s a matter of time before competitors start copying ideas.

I think even current tech monopolies are propped up by money printing. Google wasn’t always as profitable as they are today. Money printing has pumped a lot of money into the advertising sector because of its centralizing effects when companies end up competing for the new money instead of competing for customers. That’s probably why nowadays, companies are more interested in raising funding from investors than actually delivering goods and services and are barely interested in profits (e.g. Uber, Snapchat, …). A lot of the money we use nowadays is just newly printed credit.