Chapter 40: The Composite Standard (II)
A special plan is brewing step by step, and the massive amount of gold, silver and commercial credit needed to establish a complex composite standard system is being enriched into Chenji Bank little by little. Obviously, the advanced tactics of military treachery are not only to hide from the world, but also to use political axes to cope with the run crisis, relying on the illusion of unlimited strength established in the hearts of depositors in the process of unlimited exchange of gold and silver coins, in fact, many of the copper coins collected rely on strong material reserves and tens of thousands of certificates of deposit.
There are only more than 5 million 10 yuan gold coins in stock, 20 million 5 yuan silver coins and 30 million 1 yuan silver coins in reserve. According to the level of 200 Wen one yuan, the exchange price only has the ability to exchange 36 million yuan.
How did the people exchange and absorb the 223,000,000,000 guan of copper coins and the 60,000,000 guan of gold and silver coins at the exchange rate? This relied on the high-speed flow and exchange and the help of political axes at all levels of the Great Song Empire.
Suppose that a certain state of the rich Liangzhejiang Road has 2 million copper coins in the cellar, and 500,000 copper coins are circulated in the market, as long as a quarter of the copper coins in the cellar flow into the market to set up shopping materials, the price will rise by 1 times.
Chenji Bank has opened 5 outlets in this state, and its own reserves and stable long-term customer inventory of gold and silver coins can operate freely together with 1 million yuan, according to the beginning of 100 Wen 1 yuan can only absorb 100,000 copper coins, according to the price of 250 Wen 1 yuan can only absorb 250,000 yuan, even if panic appears, according to the lowest short-lived 500 Wen 1 yuan exchange can only absorb 500,000 copper coins, and 1.5 million can not be absorbed. The Traversal made a detailed plan to absorb copper coins and avoid the loss of gold and silver coins in four aspects. The first is to guide public opinion, strengthen newspaper propaganda and induce bombardment, second, to control the rate of price rise and stabilize the situation, third, to use all means to attract the rich to deposit cash in Chenji Bank, and fourth, to extract a large amount of gold and silver to mint gold and silver coins to alleviate the shortage of gold and silver coins.
After everyone knew the expectation and result of the collapse of money prices and the skyrocketing prices in the public opinion environment established by the rumors in the market and the various newspapers of Chenji, they would naturally start to grab the purchase materials from the copper coins, and the merchants who had goods would naturally raise the price and hoard the goods and reluctant to sell. Under the trade-off, it will naturally exacerbate the panic, leading to a surge in the business of Chenji Bank.
Chenji's various partners and subordinate logistics and warehousing outlets have a large number of prepared and orderly, one-class methods to limit the purchase of a certain amount of goods and necessities per person to sell the inventory of goods and necessities to the buyers before the price reaches the highest. Whether it is a merchant who intends to hoard or a poor person who does not have overnight food, they will sell it in limited quantities at 15% below the market price per capita, so as to absorb copper coins to stabilize the rate of price increase.
On the other hand, through the prestige of the yamen at all levels, the deposit receipts of Chenji Bank can be used to trade various public and private funds, such as deed tax, rent adjustment, land property and poll tax. As long as it is the warehouse of Chenji Group and its partners, the goods can be traded with bearer certificates of deposit and acceptance bills, checks, and promissory notes without cash. The interest on the certificate of deposit is automatically rolled over according to the interest settlement or collected by the bank check.
The exchange of precious metals for gold and silver coins is very advantageous for the wealthy, because one or twenty or forty grams of silver for eight yuan silver coins is only 36 grams. However, the current horizontal minting cost of precision silver coins is not achievable with 4 grams of silver.
The benefits of easy counting, weight making with small weight errors, edge hobbing to prevent scraping, and nickel plating technology on the blackened surface that is better than sterling silver are too numerous to mention. On the obverse of the silver coin is a cursive figure of Huang Tingjian and a dragon and tiger arranged vertically about two characters, and on the reverse is a circle of small characters in italic script and a plum blossom in the middle. The obverse of the silver coin five yuan is Mi Fu's seal book Wu Yuan and the deer turtle with two or so words arranged vertically, and the back is a circle of printed Yuan Yu four years of Chenji Bank several lines of small characters and chrysanthemums in the middle.
As for the gold coins, they are even more exquisite, and each 5-gram gold coin can be said to be a work of art. On the front is Su Shi's writing of the official book and a vertical arrangement of about three words of Jiahe, and on the back is a circle of printed Yuan Yu four years of Chenji Bank, a few small characters in Song style books and the peony flower in the middle. The above can be said to make Chenji money from a bad coin with insufficient weight to a good coin that is better than sterling silver. Naturally, the rich are as good as possible, and they line up in long lines to exchange a large number of them.
At the beginning of the Chenji Bank announced the exchange, many wealthy people exchanged 1 tael of gold for 8 five-gram gold coins, and then used the 8 gold coins in hand to exchange for 80 silver coins in the bank, and these 80 silver coins contained 360 grams of silver, which is exactly 9 taels of silver. Use eight taels to exchange one tael of gold in the market, and then exchange it for gold coins, repeating this process, you can continue to make profits from it. Repeating it once can theoretically earn a 12.5% profit. But the wealthy soon found themselves incurring huge losses. The reason is very simple, there is almost no gold on the market, and the gold flows into Chenji Bank. Chenji Bank, which spits out a large amount of silver coins, absorbs a huge amount of gold ingots.
The reason why Chenji can exchange a large amount of gold is because of the great wealth of silver and the scarcity of gold. The silver associated with many developed lead-zinc mines has been refined from the ore due to advanced in-house smelting technology, and the ratio of gold to silver production in Chenji has reached almost 1:50. The cost of cheap stamping coinage is almost one-fortieth that of traditional coinage, which is negligible. In just a few months, the actual gold-silver ratio of the private sector reached the record-breaking standard of 1:350 and 15:1 in the exchange rate of silver coins and gold by the Chenji Bank.
When the ratio of gold and silver in the market reaches 1:9.5, the rich who engage in this arbitrage method will no longer be able to make money. The gold stored in the cellars of each family was exchanged for silver coins and deposit receipts and entered the Chenji Bank. The silver of each family was also exchanged for certificates of deposit for interest in the subsequent decline of their habitual surnames. In the end, the exchange rate of gold, silver and copper stabilized at 1:10:2000.
In this way, the strategic goal of sweeping away the gold, silver and copper coins stored by the major families was basically achieved. The amount of money in the inventory has basically reached the size set by the public. In this way, the composite standard system of the Great Song Empire was basically established.