In order to solve the huge pressure of military spending, Lin Zhe instructed the Ministry of Finance to prepare for the issuance of bonds, and the relevant situation and system of bonds naturally refer to some experience of later generations.

There are five types of treasury bonds: one-year, two-year, three-year, five-year, and ten-year, with interest rates ranging from high to low, while the annual interest rate of 10-year treasury bonds has reached 8 percent.

In this regard, the Ministry of Finance began preliminary preparations, but although the Ministry of Finance is preparing for the issuance of bonds, Qi Xuanhao, Minister of Finance, is skeptical of national bonds!

This kind of thing asking the people for money to fill the holes in the treasury is not an uncommon thing in all dynasties, but most of them take coercive means, and they take it for nothing, and those who directly kill merchants and steal their homes are relatively low-level, and in all dynasties, there is a tradition of 'apportionment'.

Whenever the official needs money in the event of a war or other major events, it will be apportioned to the people, such as the Liao salary of the Ming Dynasty! And more are directly apportioned to the local gentry and wealthy businessmen, for example, Lin Zhe has not done this before.

When he was in Huzhou Mansion, Yu Shengjun, who was in urgent need of funds to maintain, made many assessments to the local gentry and wealthy merchants, and many people were quite dissatisfied with Lin Zhe at that time.

It's just that this dissatisfaction completely disappeared when Lin Chengting's Taiping army conquered Guangde and Changxing counties and approached the capital of Huzhou, why?

Because when the Taiping army conquered Guangde and Changxing, they almost slaughtered the local gentry and rich merchants one by one, and scared the other gentry and rich businessmen in Huzhou Mansion half to death, and at this time they knew how important Yu Shengjun was, and they couldn't even save their lives without Yu Shengjun's protection.

So much so that in 1854, when Lin Zhe led the main force of Yu Sheng's army eastward to rescue Suzhou. Many local officials and gentry businessmen in Huzhou have spoken out to save them, and even took the initiative to donate money and grain!

Thus. It is a long-standing tradition for the government to reach out to the people, especially the upper-class gentry and wealthy businessmen of the people, to ask for money!

But borrowing money from these people is serious. There is even a need to pay interest, which has not been seen much in China's thousands of years of history, and you must know that imperial China and European feudal countries are different.

In China, there is a saying that says, 'Under the Putian, it is not the king's land; To put it simply, all the land in this world belongs to the Son of Heaven. All the people of the world are subjects of the Son of Heaven.

It's not the king of a small feudal country in Europe, and he would borrow money from his subordinates.

And now Lin Zhe's debt is actually to borrow money, and he also said that he will pay interest, not to mention whether it will affect the prestige of the empire at this time, and Qi Xuanhao is more worried that if the official family does not use strong means to apportion, a few of those gentry and wealthy businessmen will take the initiative to buy these bonds.

If these bonds can't be sold, won't they be in vain?

For Qi Xuanhao's worries. Lin Zhe also didn't put too much pressure on him, and Lin Zhe also knew that if he wanted private capital to smoothly accept the nascent affairs of national bonds, the most important thing was to establish initial government credit.

In all Chinese dynasties, the credit of the government was almost equal to zero. Maybe the people can be asked to take out the money to the government by coercive means, and they must be convinced that the government will return the money to them with interest in the future, but they will definitely not believe it.

Faced with this status quo. Lin Zhe said: "Take your time first, those five-year periods." It doesn't matter if the ten-year term is not issued, the one-year term is mainly recommended first. Two-year, three-year these! ”

If the treasury bonds are to be issued smoothly, it is necessary to maintain a good reputation among the people, so first of all, we will focus on a batch of one-year bonds, although there will not be many people who buy them at that time, but after a year, these people who buy one-year treasury bonds have successfully recovered the principal and interest, then there will be others to follow suit.

And these follow-up people will not be ordinary people, but those banks, money banks and other forms of financial institutions!

Why? Because the annual interest rate of government bonds is the highest, that is, the annual interest rate of 10-year government bonds reaches 8 percent!

Maybe 8 percent is a very small number for ordinary people, and if you invest 1,000 yuan, it will only be 80 yuan a year, which is completely unsightly for many people.

But for financial institutions, this 8% annual return is enough for them to mobilize a lot of money to invest!

These financial institutions, whether they are money banks or banks, they have a large amount of hoarding funds, and the funds that come in from the deposits cannot be kept all the time, which will kill them, and they want to release these deposits, which are generally mainly lent to commercial banks and enterprises.

For example, Shanghai's financial industry is very active, a large amount of funds in the financial industry have been invested in raw silk related industries through loans, for example, silk reeling factories to buy silkworm cocoons to be able to start reeling silk, people to buy silkworm cocoons is a great expense, because raw silk is a category of luxury, whether it is finished raw silk or silkworm cocoons are extremely expensive, whenever the cocoons are listed, an ordinary silk reeling factory needs to spend a lot of money to buy silkworm cocoons, and the funds spent may even exceed their own assets.

In other words, it is difficult for most silk reeling factories to complete the purchase and production of silkworm cocoons with their own working capital, and support them until the raw silk is sold.

In order to ensure a stable source of silkworm cocoons, some large-scale silk reeling factories often go to Huzhou and other cocoon producing areas to sign pre-purchase contracts with local commercial houses or simply with farmers, which will squeeze huge funds on the production supply.

At this time, the role of various financial institutions is highlighted, the traditional money bank, those foreigners' banks, and the newly established private banks will lend a large amount of money to the silk reeling factory every year to maintain their normal purchase of silkworm cocoons and production, and the silk reeling factory produces raw silk for sale, and then replaces the loan, and continues this step next year.

This has formed a link between the most basic financial industry and the raw silk industry!

The risk of lending to these industries is high, and the competition in the financial industry itself is also very large, and the annual interest rate is falling year by year, especially after the establishment of the Royal Bank, due to the opening of the major cities of the empire, the scale of deposits accepted is extremely large, and the royal industry is not a purely commercial institution, but also has the responsibility of leading the development of domestic industry and commerce.

The Royal Bank was personally asked by Lin Zhe to support the industry and commerce represented by machinery and raw silk, so the interest rate of the loans provided by the Royal Bank to enterprises is often lower than that of other banks and foreigners' banks.

If it's just that the interest rate is low, it's nothing, and the more important thing is that the branches of the Royal Bank are opened all over the country, and in the controlled area of the Chinese Empire, almost every county has their branches, and the staff of these Royal Banks often follow the footsteps of the Chinese Army, and the Chinese Army has just taken a certain city on the front foot, and the branches of the Royal Bank will be open for business in the local area within a few days, and at first this is just to serve the military and the official. Because the salaries of military personnel, as well as the salaries of officials, and other financial transactions are carried out through the Royal Bank, if the branches of the Royal Bank do not follow up in a timely manner, this demand cannot be effectively met.

The wide opening of branches, and at the same time as a treasury deposit, officials have been paid by military personnel to open banks, which has caused the Royal Bank to absorb deposits is a very staggering figure.

By the end of November, the Royal Bank had accumulated more than 50 million deposits, which is an extremely terrifying figure for modern times, and you must know that in 1857, the tax revenue of the Chinese Empire was only more than 40 million, and it was not even as much as the deposits of the Royal Bank.

But there is a reason to be able to have so many deposits, the salary accounts of hundreds of thousands of soldiers and officials in the empire are in the Royal Bank, not everyone will withdraw their salaries as soon as they arrive!

In addition to the salary deposits of civil servants and military personnel in these countries, there is a more important one, which is the national tax agency business, in other words, the Royal Bank bears all the tax revenues and expenditures of the state.

From the state taxes, and then the money is paid, many times it is an internal transfer of the Royal Bank, that is, the money is still in the Royal Bank.

With so many deposits, the Royal Bank is not one of those old banks that does not have to pay interest to depositors, although the interest is far less than it was later, but the average annual interest rate is about one percent.

If these deposits are not lent out, the interest paid to depositors alone will be enough to bankrupt the Royal Bank!

The Royal Bank, which had sufficient deposits, lent heavily to domestic businesses at lower interest rates, while other banks had to lower interest rates if they wanted to compete with the Royal Bank.

And this is very uncomfortable for many foreign banks and banks!

If there is an annual interest rate that is much higher than that of ordinary loans, and more importantly, the base of these treasury bonds is very large, even if you buy tens of millions of people, the finance department will also recruit.

If you invest with 1,000 silver dollars, the annual interest rate of 50% is too little, but if you use tens of thousands of hundreds of thousands of dollars to invest, the annual interest rate has to be more than 10 percent, and if you use millions of tens of millions to invest, if you can achieve an average annual interest rate of more than 10%, the future generations of Balfitte will have to worship you as a teacher!

The larger the scale of the capital, the more difficult it is to carry out capital operation, generally more than tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of taels of capital operation, if you can have an interest rate of 5 percent, you have to snicker, even if the interest rate is a few points, the income is millions or even tens of millions.

Based on these characteristics of capital, in order to successfully issue the national bonds of the Empire, you cannot actually expect ordinary wealthy merchants and gentry to buy them, but you have to count on these financial capital institutions to buy them, because only they have the strength to buy millions or even tens of millions.

Therefore, once the credit problem of treasury bonds is solved, the subsequent issuance of treasury bonds will not be too much of a problem!

But the crux of the matter is that this national debt is now creditless, let alone a mere national debt, and even the credit of the Chinese Empire itself is almost equal to zero among ordinary people.

There will definitely be no Lin Zhe raising his arms, and then countless people will cry and shout to pay for treasury bonds! (To be continued......)