Molp, that makes sense. Currency/active corporation is the key figure.
Ah, you’re asking about my field. Let me put on my economist hat for a moment. I write mostly about trade, but inflation is closely related.
Most people think more money in the system means more inflation, but that’s true only when more money affects supply vs demand. If people suddenly had another 20K - say all active corporations find an alien treasure chest buried on their base (mysteriously filled with whatever currency they use) - some items might not see any rise in prices. If players spent all that money to fund ship travel between exchanges, there isn’t any increase in demand for workers, and therefore no further demand for Basic Consumables.
More likely, people would buy building materials, and expanded bases add more workers and therefore more demand for Basic Consumables. But demand vs supply is the limiting factor on price, not the amount of money in the system. If players are restricted to a single small base, then the price of building components plummets (since no one can use the materials), no matter how much money they have.
We see this in the real world where sky-high inflation accompanies limited supply. Lots of countries “print money” to pay for government projects (or graft), but inflation is over 50% in only two, both with squeezed supply/ trade: Venezuela (which has ill-advised price caps), and South Sudan (with supply chains broken by war).
So how you introduce more money matters a whole lot. Milton Friedman wrote about central banks dropping money into economies “by helicopter,” but he didn’t detail how that would actually be done. In this game, if you do it with more market-maker purchases, those goods will be the first to see prices rise, of course. The extent to which the price increase spreads depends on pent-up demand for each product.
People have strong feelings about government debt, printing money, and inflation. Even economists still debate (to some extent) monetarist vs Keynesian models. We don’t need to wade into those. This game has giant economic levers that can be pulled to affect prices and production as desired. More market-maker purchases reduce supply while sales increase them. Worker consumption rates do the same. Demand even responds to the requirements for buildings and the limits on base size, etc.
tl;dr? Currency/active corporation is a key figure, whatever else you track.
For inflation, it’ll help to follow the relative prices of different production lines: inflation here can hurt when a Metallurgist sees rising prices but a Victualler doesn’t.