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The deal with the Dutch was settled, and Geng Jingzhong also turned the old rifle that he didn't use into money. Soon, a former royal reserve rifle was brought to these Dutchmen, of course, this gun is still old-fashioned, it can be regarded as a hardcover, the workmanship is more exquisite than the ordinary rifle, and the power is also good. The prince's collection, of course, is beautifully made, and the power is not bad. Although this is already an old-fashioned rifle in the eyes of the horsetail soldiers, it is far better than their standard rifle in the eyes of the Dutch, although Europe is now widely equipped with flintlock pistols, but there are still some arquebuses used in the Dutch army!

Geng Jingzhong looked at the happy appearance of several Dutchmen, but he was not worried at all that the Dutch would use this gun to imitate, even if he copied Geng Jingzhong, he couldn't stop it, but there was no threat to him. On the Mawei Army's side, Geng Jingzhong, a traverser, ordered the firearms workshop to continue to develop and improve in the general direction he specified, and the development speed of the musket must be far beyond the reach of others, and the performance of the rifle will only be stronger than the current one. What's more, when the mainland is stable in a few years, with the population in the country and powerful weapons, there will definitely be a lot to be done in the whole world!

On this envoy of Tong Guò Stuart, Geng Jingzhong's cooperation with the Dutch was finalized, as for the British, since a series of agreements have been signed, it is still difficult to regret it for the time being, plus there is still a mess on their side. Then let the British and Dutch bite each other at sea. I just need to make sure that the situation is within my control. Just like now. Even if they cooperated with the Dutch, it was just to make money, and the same was true for the British, and it would be beneficial for them to properly maintain the British in the South China Sea.

Stuart and his party were gone, but the Dutch merchants came more, and the caravans came, which meant that several of their ports would become more prosperous. This is very beneficial to stimulating the economy on your side. In just half a month, the Dutch merchants in Batavia seemed to have discussed and came to several ports in Guangzhou, Zhangzhou and Fuzhou to do business. In fact, this is also the credit of the governor of Batavia, Neskas, who, in order to strengthen cooperation with Geng Jingzhong's side, vigorously encouraged Dutch merchants and businessmen from other countries to come to the Chinese coast to do business.

Of course, there are also Fujian Development Bank and Guangdong Construction Bank (newly established), these Western red-haired ghosts also brought a lot of silver nuggets, of course, they are all to be exchanged through Guò Bank into huàn into silver dollars circulating in Fujian and Guangdong. In just a few days, a few banks exchanged 800,000 large silver dollars. That's 40 tons of silver, which is not a small number!

Of course, Geng Jingzhong also saw this report. First happy, and then his face quickly turned bad. The bank has a lot of money, which also shows that the business in the port is big these days, and then taxes or other things are collected, but the principal of more than 3 million taels of gold in the bank is still sealed there, and it cannot be used at all, which is also an order he personally ordered. However, thinking of the new amount of silver in this bank, he can mobilize more, of course, the premise is that he can't touch the principal.

Hey, there is a shortage of silver, not only for him, but for the whole country! Although he got a lot of silver through the Guò Bank and then converted it into silver coins, the circulation in these provinces was still insufficient. There are big constructions everywhere, and the silver is being sent down one by one, but it still seems to be less for all the people! There are hundreds of millions of simple silver coins that have been issued now, but most of them are still those landlords and gentry who have exchanged the silver ingots in their silver cellars for silver coins. It is estimated that there are 30 million pieces on the market, but if you think about the other occupied prefectures and counties in Fujian and Guangdong, there are also more than 10 million people, and the total number of big silver dollars, small silver dollars, and silver horns is only 30 million taels, which is too little!

Since the time of the previous dynasty, no, now it has been anti-Qing and restored, or the Ming Dynasty, the Ming Dynasty has always been so short of silver, it was natural to affect the development of commerce, and they must speed up their development, and the silver nuggets obtained from trade with Westerners cannot fundamentally solve the current problems. I can't let this kind of thing continue to develop, otherwise my side will become poorer and poorer like the previous court, look at that Chongzhen, when Chongzhen was ten years old, the finances of the court were on the verge of bankruptcy.

Some people may want to say that a lot of silver flowed to China in the world during this period, which is indeed true. Later, a Western scholar named Guise affirmed in the article "Beijing in the Ming Dynasty": "Since the 25th year of Wanli, that is, since 1597, the Spanish galleons have transported a total of 145,000 kilograms of silver from Acapulco to China, which is more than the output of the Ming Dynasty in half a century.

Yes, there was indeed a large amount of silver flowing into China at that time, but this silver was still not enough for the rapidly expanding economy of the Ming Dynasty at that time, and the most important thing was that the silver had not yet flowed into the hands of the Ming court. Moreover, when the West also interrupted the huge silver supply chain in China, during the Longqing period just a hundred years ago, there was a scarcity of Yan zhòng, a sentence: "The people of the world, the emperor is worried about the scarcity, not enough grain and cloth, but not enough silver." "It's a blessing.

For the shortcoming of insufficient silver, the rulers of the Ming Dynasty also had an early experience. As early as the eighth year of Hongwu in the Ming Dynasty, Geng Jingzhong at this time was two hundred years ago, due to the lack of precious metals such as silver and copper at that time, so the Hongwu Emperor who was born in the cattle herding baby promulgated a thing called "banknote law", set up a treasure banknote lifting division, and then set up two bureaus of papermaking and banknote printing and two banknotes and two libraries for banknotes. It was issued the following year under the name of Nanjing, Zhongshu Province. In addition, it was forbidden for the people to buy and sell gold and silver, which means that the imperial court began to replace precious metals with paper money.

The denominations of the treasure banknotes are the same, with six types: 500 wen, 400 wen, 300 wen, 200 wen, and 100 wen. It stands to reason that the use of paper money should be a symbol of civilization. It is also the inevitable result of social development. But the blame for the Ming Dynasty is here. The issuance of banknotes by the Ming Dynasty has always been only issued but not received. There is no demarcation, no recycling of old banknotes, and no modern sense of reserves, resulting in more and more banknotes circulating in the market. The treasure banknotes were flooded, and inflation began in the year of issuance.

There is an example that shows how ignorant our Hongwu Emperor was about issuing paper money, and once, Zhu Yuanzhang's fourth son, Zhu Di, returned to the dynasty after winning a battle. Zhu Yuanzhang was happy and gave Zhu Di a "check" - a treasure note with a face value of one million taels. This is also the largest treasure note in the Ming Dynasty, and the purchasing power of these money is about 100 million yuan today. It is estimated that this is also a million number that Zhu Yuanzhang printed in advance on a whim. Anyway, he is the emperor, and he can write as many numbers as he wants, which shows how ignorant the rulers of the Ming Dynasty were about finance, and the people also ridiculed the toilet paper used by the emperor as "treasure money", and the deep meaning behind it can be known.

In view of this, by the Zhengde period, the treasure banknote had actually been abolished. After that, the Ming Dynasty no longer issued banknotes, and only the treasure banknotes issued before were still barely in circulation. Although the credibility of the treasure banknote is ruined. But you have to do it, right? Metallic currencies such as gold, silver, and copper began to circulate among the people, but due to the lack of precious metals. The economy of the Ming Dynasty had become somewhat deformed.

Around the time of the Ming Dynasty's Apocalypse, that is, fifty years ago, the price of silver and copper coins was only about 600 Wen. In the early years of Chongzhen, it had risen to 1,200 Wen, and by the end of Chongzhen, it had risen to more than 2,500 Wen. This situation led to the soaring price of goods, coupled with the tax paid by the imperial court, and the situation of the people's poor livelihood generally appeared. But this apparently does not explain why the previous inflow of silver into China failed to save the Ming dynasty from its financial crisis.

In the first year of orthodoxy, that is, in 1436, more than 70 years after the founding of the Ming Dynasty, Emperor Yingzong converted a part of the grain into gold and silver and put it into the inner carrier. From then on, the inner carrier treasury became the emperor's small treasury. The appearance of the small treasury may have meant that the emperor began to compete with the government for the limited resources of the empire, which was the reason why the courtiers repeatedly asked the emperor to issue funds from the inner treasury. Two hundred years later, when the receiving officials of the Dashun Imperial Court opened the treasury of the inner carrier, they were stunned. From April 10, Li Zicheng's guards began to carry silver from here. Yang Shicong, an eyewitness to this unprecedented silver transportation activity, recorded the detailed amount of silver in the national treasury in his book "Jiashen Nuclear Truth": 37 million taels! Therefore, he lamented that 37 million taels of silver was equivalent to the "three salaries" of the imperial court for two years at that time, and if he could take out these silver and offset the additional distribution, it would undoubtedly be a fatal blow to the expansion of the strength of the army. Possessing such a large amount of wealth that he was unwilling to use it in the event of life and death, Chongzhen spent the last years of his life explaining the relationship between rulers and money in a special way.

Another piece of bad news was that the ministers and eunuchs in Chongzhen's court were as greedy for silver as the emperor. After Li Zicheng entered Beijing, he ordered the establishment of the "Biyu Zhenfu Division", which was presided over by the generals Liu Zongmin and Li Guo, and confiscated the property of the former Ming officials. The department issued a standard, requiring officials at all levels of the former Ming Dynasty to hand over silver according to the standard of "100,000 in the middle hall, 70,000 or 530,000 in the Jingtang brocade of the ministry and the academy, 530,000 in the Taoist department, 321,000 in the Hanlin, and thousands of subordinates and subordinates."

In order to ensure the efficiency of confiscation, Liu Zongmin made 5,000 clamping sticks as torture tools. The salary under the heavy sentence is very substantial. The officials who had been indifferent to Emperor Chongzhen's proposal to donate military salaries had all contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars of property. In addition to the private seizure of silver by officers at all levels, as well as the hoarding of silver that has not been confiscated, 20% of the 10,000 tons of silver that has flowed into China in recent decades have been hoarded in the homes of officials at all levels of the imperial family in Beijing. The practice of private silver cellaring was also very common at this time. After Chongzhen, with the escalation of war, the phenomenon of hoarding silver became more common. The economic pressure of the Ming Dynasty brought about by the monetary tightening eventually became more and more apparent, and the last Han dynasty in China finally collapsed.

After reading the recent various reports, especially the financial ones, Geng Jingzhong lay quietly on the recliner and thought, thinking of what he saw in history books and film and television materials in later generations, cold sweat broke out on his back, it seems that his level is still not enough! However, this later life has already given him a ready-made solution, and now the time is about the same, and it is time to implement it! Isn't the Geng Group short of money now, but there are banks and there is not enough silver, and there is another way to make money, which is also the most profitable business in the world - printing money!

This business has not been carried out by several banks until now, and now it is time to start it. Although paper money itself has no value, as a kind of currency, it cannot directly exercise the function of value scale. Paper money is a form of currency commonly used by all countries in the world in later generations, but the world's earliest paper money is the invention of our Han working people in ancient times, and our Jiaozi in Chengdu, Sichuan during the Northern Song Dynasty is the earliest paper money, so our China is also the earliest country in the world to use paper money.

Some people may ask, isn't the most profitable thing to monopolize an industry, then you are wrong, no matter how monopolized, the transaction is still money, what is money, of course, it can be a piece of paper. Therefore, it is not the corporations that make the most money, it is not the monopoly of production, but the banks, and the banks that print money are the most profitable. What does money stand for? It is just a symbol, it represents a country's gross national product and productivity, and controls the issuance of currency, that is, the wealth of the entire country.

Naturally, the banks under Geng Jingzhong's command can only issue currency on their own territory, which means that Geng Jingzhong can promote the currency there no matter how much territory he has in the future. Although these places now have a unified currency - silver coins. The standard silver coins such as large silver dollars and small silver dollars and silver slots were used to replace the silver ingot system of varying fineness, which was popular in the original domestic chaos, but it still had no effect in remote areas or areas controlled by non-Geng Jingzhong, and there were many large merchants in the inland who had copied them, but they were discontinued because of the lack of silver and the inability to create such a loss.

"Someone, summon Mr. Yao and the Minister of Finance to discuss matters here." Since it was decided, Geng Jingzhong immediately issued an order, and the time has come to make a fortune! (To be continued......)

PS: It's a little late