I think there is a fundamental contradiction here, and it has very little to do with BuzzerBeater specifically. This is basic economics.
You are trying to achieve two things at the same time:
Reduce the amount of cash managers are able to hold, potentially moving the effective ceiling from $25M to $15M and perhaps even lower in the future.
Keep transfer-market prices high, or even push them higher.
In the short term, both can happen at once. In the long term, however, they naturally work against each other.
The basic framework is the quantity equation:
M × V = P × Q
Where:
M = money supply
V = velocity of money
P = price level
Q = quantity of goods/transactions
When the hoarding threshold is suddenly reduced, you can temporarily increase V dramatically. Managers who were holding $20M, $25M or $30M now have a strong incentive to spend that money quickly before it is taxed.
That can absolutely create short-term inflation in the Transfer List.
In other words, money that was previously sitting inactive in bank accounts suddenly starts chasing players.
So I completely understand the argument that prices may rise this season.
But that is a transition effect. It is not the long-term equilibrium.
After the excess cash has been spent, if the system continuously prevents managers from rebuilding large cash reserves, and increasingly removes money through taxation, then M falls.
Once the one-time increase in velocity has played out, you cannot keep increasing V forever to compensate for a continuously smaller money supply.
All else being equal:
lower M → lower aggregate purchasing power → downward pressure on P.
This is not a BuzzerBeater theory. This is one of the most basic relationships in monetary economics.
If tomorrow a real-world economy doubled its money supply while producing the same amount of goods, we would expect upward pressure on prices.
If you remove a large part of the available money from the economy while keeping the supply of goods broadly similar, the opposite pressure exists.
Obviously the relationship is not perfectly mechanical because velocity, supply, expectations and other variables matter. But you cannot continuously reduce purchasing power and simultaneously assume asset prices will remain structurally higher without another variable compensating for it.
There is also an important distinction between spending money and destroying money.
If I buy a player for $8M, most of that $8M does not disappear from the BB economy. It moves from the buyer to the seller. The transaction increases circulation, but it does not meaningfully reduce the total money supply except for transaction taxes or other sinks.
A hoarding tax is different. Money removed by the tax is actually destroyed.
Therefore a harsher hoarding tax can create two opposite effects at different times:
Short term: managers rush to spend → velocity rises → player prices can rise.
Long term: cash reserves are smaller and money is continuously removed → purchasing power falls → player prices face downward pressure.
This is why I find the statement that, if prices fall later, an even harsher hoarding tax could be the solution very difficult to reconcile economically.
It may create another temporary spending rush. But once that adjustment is complete, you have removed even more purchasing power from the system.
You cannot repeatedly solve a shortage of demand by further reducing the amount of money available to demand.
If the objective is simultaneously to have:
smaller cash reserves,
less tanking,
shorter team-building cycles,
larger/more competitive rosters,
and higher player prices,
then something else has to compensate.
For example, the game would need some combination of higher recurring revenues, lower non-player expenses, greater demand for players, reduced supply of high-quality players, more roster spots that are economically viable, or some othe