"Brother Bo Yu, this time the emperor gave you one thousand acres of land, why not collect it?"

After all, Ma Jiyuan is one of Zhu Hongsan's elders. Although he has been removed from office now, Zhu Hongsan is still good at Ma Jiyuan. When he left Nanjing, he was given a thousand acres of land for his elderly care.

"Shutian, how can I still have the face to go back to Wuchang to ask for that thousand acres of land? Now the Ma family in Wuchang has occupied 100,000 acres of land. Although most of it is in Zhongyu's hands, I feel ashamed of the elders of my hometown!"

"Then where are Brother Bo Yu going to go back this time?"

Ma Jiyuan’s hometown is in Wuchang, but this time Ma Jiyuan did not walk on the Yangtze River, but took his family and servants to the south gate.

"Shutian, I left home since I was a child. To be honest, I don't remember anything in my hometown. This time I am going to go to Ningguo Mansion. After all, I have lived there for more than ten years!"

Ma Jiyuan's eldest uncle had no son and only had two daughters, so when Ma Jiyuan was young, his father Ma Guoxiang adopted him to his eldest uncle Ma Guoan. At that time, Ma Guoan was the county magistrate in Nanling County, Ningguo Prefecture, and was promoted to the prefect and prefect. Therefore, Ma Jiyuan spent the best childhood in Ningguo Prefecture, so he was not prepared to return to Wuchang this time, but went to Ningguo Prefecture to retire.

Fang Fengnian nodded when he heard Ma Jiyuan say this, and stopped talking but bowed to Ma Jiyuan.

Fang Fengnian and Ma Jiyuan separated and returned to the city. As soon as they arrived at Qianbulang's own office, they saw the tax department's clerk coming to him.

"Sir Shangshu, Mr. Wang Ge sent someone to see you many times, saying that Yuanfu held an economic work meeting and asked the Minister of the Secretariat of the Ministry of Finance, Taxation and Civil Affairs to attend the meeting. The Minister of Xue and the Minister of the Ministry of Justice in the Ministry have already gone!"

This time, the cabinet was adjusted greatly, and the new team would naturally have a new look when they came to power. As Ma Jiyuan's same year, Fang Fengnian was originally the assistant minister of the logistics department. In order to buy the second year of Tianqi, Ma Mingyuan specially transferred Fang Fengnian to the Tax Department to serve as the Minister of the Shangshu.

As the name suggests, the Ministry of Taxation is a tax collector. It has a jurisdiction over the 15 provincial Qingguan Departments, as well as five customs Qingguan Departments in Nanjing, Hangzhou, Quanzhou, Guangzhou and Luzon. It has a heavy power. Because the Ministry of Taxation comes from the former Ministry of Revenue, the Secretary of the Ministry of Finance has always served as the Secretary of the Ministry of Finance Chen Zilong. Now, in order to win people's hearts, Ma Mingyuan handed over this important position to Fang Fengnian.

Fang Fengnian went to see Ma Jiyuan off today, and he had a leave of absence from the chief cabinet master Wang Yunchang. Now he heard that the chief minister Ma Mingyuan had something to do with him, so he quickly changed into his official robe and rushed to the cabinet office of Qianbulang.

The cabinet is in Qianbulang, near Hongwu Gate, opposite to it are military agencies such as the Five Army Governor's Office. The cabinet does not occupy a large area, only three small buildings in front and back. The first is the office location of the Cabinet's Literature Office, the second is the office location of the six deputy prime ministers in the Cabinet, and the last is the office of the Prime Minister Ma Mingyuan and a small conference room.

When Fang Fengnian arrived, the meeting had already begun, but it was not yet the Ministry of Taxation’s turn to report on the work, and the Minister of Finance Chen Zilong was talking.

Fang Fengnian coughed at the door, then walked into the conference room, bowed and said, "Yuanfu, Master Wang, I'm late to come, please forgive me!"

Ma Mingyuan nodded and said, "Brother Shutian, please sit down. What has Mr. Wang told me about the situation!" Ma Mingyuan did not say the reason why Fang Fengnian asked for leave. After all, it was inappropriate for him to not send off his brother as his own brother.

Fang Fengnian didn't say it out loud, bowed and bowed to Chen Zilong, bowed slightly to his colleagues around him, and sat in his own position.

Chen Zilong was interrupted by Fang Fengnian just now. He looked at Ma Mingyuan, and Ma Mingyuan said, "Please continue talking about it in the human world!"

"Yes, Yuan Fu! The official just now said that the national treasury is now in stock 5.68 million taels of silver, but they are all pattern silver released from Guangdong and Zhejiang provinces. The equivalent of flat silver is 5.17 million taels. This is all the money at present. Please decide how to use it!"

Ma Mingyuan had known this number for a long time. Although he didn't care about finance, the Ministry of Finance was his nest and the news was still very well-informed.

"Old Master Wang Ge, Shangshu Chen, now that His Majesty is about to enter the Northern Expedition, we must ensure the production progress of arsenals in various places. Mr. Tong Ge has told me many times that the Logistics Department has owed the arsenal's salary for three months. Tomorrow, the Ministry of Finance will allocate all the salary for these three months to the Logistics Department!"

"Yuanfu, the salary for three months is 2 million taels, so the national treasury is only 3 million taels left. At the end of the year, the salary for officials will be paid in the past six months, which will require 3.7 million taels. What should I do if the shortfall of the silver?"

"Don't worry about this among people. The property of the house searched before the end of the year will be in place. It is estimated that it will have more than one million taels! The mint has been reopened, and the kuping silver in the treasury will be immediately pressed into silver dollars. In the future, all salary expenses will be settled in silver dollars!"

The Ming Dynasty treasury stipulated that the silver silver in the national treasury was 95% of the silver, but the silver dollar that Zhu Hongsan made was only 87% of the silver. In this way, a silver coin made a profit of 80%. The 5.17 million treasury silver in the national treasury immediately turned into 5.58 million silver dollars, and the money was no faster than this. This was just the profit of coin minting, and the difference in exchange for silver dollars was not counted.

A silver dollar is priced at one liang, and the official counterparts one liang of silver. However, you must know that the silver in Kuping has impurities, so one liang and five cents of Kuping silver can be exchanged for one silver dollar. The extra five cents are fire consumption. This is the national treasury of the national treasury. If the taxes sent by various places are higher, the fire consumption is higher. Because Guangzhou is a trading port, Guangzhou has many silver impurities, and the fire consumption is at most one qian and seven cents of silver. Therefore, Zhu Hongsan made a lot of money by promoting the silver dollar.

According to market economy theory, silver coins such as the Ming Dynasty that contain little silver will definitely depreciate after issuance. However, four years ago, Ma Mingyuan had the prescient idea to bind the value of silver dollars, white sugar and refined salt, and used state power to forcibly stipulate that the white sugar produced in Leizhou is five silver dollars per kilogram and fine salt is one silver dollars per kilogram.

Because Leizhou's white sugar and fine salt production is so large, and it also has a technical monopoly, other salt fields and sugar factories cannot produce such white sugar and salt, so the value of silver coins linked to white sugar and salt is very stable. In the private sector of Nanzhili, one silver dollar exchanged for one or seven cents of silver. In the distant inland, such as Sichuan and Shaanxi, where transportation is inconvenient, the prices of white sugar and salt have risen, so the silver dollar exchanged for silver is even one to two or five.

In fact, the current financial situation of the Shenwu court is not as unbearable as Chen Zilong said at the court meeting, as if he was about to go bankrupt. Now, because the 30th Years of Europe War ended, the silver imported from the Ming Dynasty was more than in previous years, and the amount of silver would depreciate, so the business in Guangdong did not frequently go bankrupt as Chen Zilong said.

During the Wanli period of the Ming Dynasty, capitalism emerged in Jiangnan, private commerce developed greatly, and the demand for money increased greatly. However, copper coins were not as useful as silver in terms of currency value and quantity, so a large amount of overseas silver flowed into the Ming Dynasty. At the peak of this flow, it reached a scale of more than 2 million taels per year.

However, with the outbreak of the Thirty Years' War in 1618, Spain transported all the silver produced in the Americas back to the sovereign country for war in order to participate in the war. The silver flowing into China became less, and in the end it was gone.

The silver flowing into China has become less, but the Ming Dynasty encountered a chaotic world, and the already stretched finances would make it even worse. If the Ming Dynasty implemented the silver coin system at this time, it could still persist, but the silver system implemented by the Ming Dynasty used the weight of precious metals as currency. In this way, the country had no right to monitor the currency at all, and the Chinese still had the habit of saving, and a large amount of silver was buried in their yards and flower beds.

At this time, after Zhang Juzheng's reform, the Ming Dynasty did not collect in-kind taxes, and it turned into silver. At first, because there was a lot of private silver, it could still collect five or six million yuan in the Wanli period. However, during the Chongzhen period, due to the fall of Wei Zhongxian, no one had to get money from the emperor through additional channels, and he could only ask for money from the official taxes of the people.

At this time, due to the decrease in the flow of silver among the people, scholars did not have to pay taxes, the serious annexation of private land, and the forced occupation of a large amount of land by vassal kings in various places, the original plan to collect 7.87 million taels of silver in the third year of Chongzhen, but in the end, only 920,000 taels of silver was collected.

Such a large country only has an income of 920,000 taels of silver, so things will naturally happen. In the future, those refugees, bandits and other things will go with the flow.

The country's fortunes of the Ming Dynasty were over, but the luck of the Qing Dynasty was really great. The Thirty Years of Europe ended in 16th and 48th. In the second year, the silver in the Americas began to flow back to the Ming Dynasty. At this time, the Qing Dynasty had occupied the richest Nanzhili, with money and food, so that it could support the Qing Dynasty to suppress the Southern Ming and the rebels from all over the country.

However, the good luck of the Qing Dynasty in this time and space was occupied by Zhu Hongsan because Zhu Hongsan himself owned a large number of commercial banks and factories, and the profits generated by these factories were not included in the national taxation, so the current situation is not as serious as Chen Zilong said.

Ma Mingyuan was old because of finance, so he naturally knew what the real situation was. However, in order to get back to the position of the chief minister, he had no choice but to say the financial situation extremely seriously, as if he was about to part with him tomorrow, so he squeezed Ma Jiyuan out of the position of the chief minister.

Fang Fengnian was a prefect before and still knew some methods of silver and money, but how could his self-taught vocational high school education be compared with undergraduates like Ma Mingyuan? Fang Fengnian sat on the side and listened to Ma Mingyuan talking about the method of silver and dollar, and was admired in his heart while listening.

Fang Fengnian looked down on Ma Mingyuan very much, thinking that he was just a scholar. He relied on following the emperor to occupy a good position in the court early. If he was given a prefecture and county, he might be less than his own. But today he heard Ma Mingyuan talking about currency reform here, and then he realized that Ma Mingyuan was really unique in finance, which was not something he could compare with.
Chapter completed!