The letter was written to his benefactor, Mr. Liang. (〔?(([((The Liang family has always been his backstage and his important customer. As soon as the currency reform came out, it caused a stir.
Mr. Liang was very interested and asked him to always pay attention to the movements of Australians.
In the letter, he wrote in detail about the process of the meeting and everyone's attitude, especially his attitude of sparing no effort to stand up for the Australians. It seems that the Australian currency reform is imperative. At the meeting, everyone has taken the initial steps.
An agreement was reached, and each industry guild will share the amount of new currency exchanged according to the size and capital strength. The money industry guild has the largest share, which needs to be exchanged for 200,000 silver dollars. This number is considered acceptable by the guild internally - after all, Australians
The exchange conditions given are fairly fair, and the quality is reasonable considering the weight. It is not a disadvantage to exchange silver for silver dollars.
However, Liang Chenlong also wrote down his concerns in the letter. He was worried that converting silver into silver coins was only the first step. The next step was to ask them to accept a certain amount of silver dollar circulation certificates.
As he wrote this, he sighed deeply, thinking that the next step would inevitably involve converting the collected copper coins into auxiliary currency certificates - this was almost a certainty. Although copper coins are not very valuable, they are still money.
Ah, it really hurts him to put it on paper.
After writing the letter, he sealed it, sealed it, called a confidant, and whispered a few instructions.
As usual, the letter was not sent to the Liang family, but to Miss Yue Wan in the Chun Chun Courtyard. Yue Wan was "combed" by Liang Cunhou, which is equivalent to his outer room in the courtyard. Many things are not easy to be done openly.
, all connected through her.
The servant took the order and left. Liang Chenlong looked at his back and couldn't help but exhale.
Liu Xiang sat at his desk and looked at the latest demographic table on the table. Based on the first household registration data after the establishment of the Guangzhou police system, he knew the exact population of Guangzhou Special City for the first time.
According to the administrative divisions of Nanhai and Panyu's two Fuguo counties left by the Ming Dynasty, plus the areas outside the city that are expected to be classified as "suburban areas", including Henan Island and other places, the registered population totals 283,700.
One hundred people. Includes all permanent residents with fixed residences in Guangzhou. It does not include the "floating population" such as the Guandi Temple people and horses - this population is at least more than 10,000.
The new household registration does not distinguish between non-agricultural and agricultural populations, because the distinction between the two populations in the 17th century was not so clear-cut. Except for clerks, shopkeepers, and craftsmen in the city who returned to the countryside to help when they were busy, farmers in the countryside entered the country for a short period of time.
People come to work in the city, and there are many real farmers living in Guangzhou who work on the land in the city. Therefore, they only register in the broad category of occupations - after all, in this era, the occupations a person engages in are basically lifelong.
The registered population figures do not include the population of Dan people. The data on Dan people received by Hebo Institute are very old and are still from the Zhang Juzheng era. According to this outdated data, there are 22,000 Dan people registered in Hebo Institute. However, the retained
An old official at the Hebo Station said that the number of Dan people is far more than this. Because they live in no fixed places and wander, it is difficult to accurately count the number of people. However, the Dan people who have been active on the water of the Xijiang River and the Pearl River outside Guangzhou for a long time will not
Less than 40,000 people.
To fully understand how many Dan people there are, we must allow them to settle ashore. In 1950, the first large-scale practical project of the Guangzhou Municipal Government was to build residential buildings for Dan people and allow them to live ashore, thus controlling this free population for the first time.
groups outside mainstream society.
Controlling the Dan people and allowing them to land and live ashore and establish households would be of great benefit to the public security of the Pearl River system, and even to the security of Guangzhou: rivers and lakes have been natural hiding places for lawless elements since ancient times.
But now Liu Xiang's Guangzhou Special Municipal Government is unable to do this, so he has to temporarily give up his attempt to control the people and focus on the implementation of the new currency.
The key to the credit of the new currency lies in whether the purchasing power can be guaranteed. Liu Xiang knows very well that once the new currency starts to be circulated, the flow of banknotes will be like a flood that breaks a dike.
The first is the demand for currency circulation in Guangzhou's market. No one knows how much this number is - there was no statistics bureau in the Ming Dynasty, and there were no banks in the modern sense. No one knows how many silver and copper coins are circulating in the market.
Not sure. The Ministry of Finance can only roughly estimate that one million yuan of circulating notes is needed. Worried that it is not enough, the Ministry of Finance has ordered millions more banknotes to be printed at the Hong Kong Mint. The second is the expenditure of the Guangzhou Municipal Government. Guangzhou
The expenditures of the city government have increased more than a hundred times compared to those of the Guangzhou government in the past. Many new agencies have been built and maintained in operation, rapidly expanding public officials, sheltered old personnel, relief for victims, municipal projects... plus whether there is any increase
The reduction in demand for military spending has sharply increased the amount of new currency that needs to be put on the market. After a rough estimate, Liu Xiang and a team of special commissioners from the Ministry of Finance and Economics have already become worried about the inflation of the new currency.
Liu Xiang picked up another secret report, which was the latest grain inventory statistics in Guangzhou. After canceling the merchants and establishing two bulk goods wholesale markets, it was mandatory that all bulk grain transactions must be sold in the market. Long-distance trafficking from outside
Grain merchants, farmers and landowners who sell grain in batches, and local grain shops and grain shops engaged in wholesale and retail business all conduct business in the market. The state-owned enterprises of the Senate, cooperatives and Dachang Rice Shop that deal in grain are also in the market.
A business office was opened as a window for operating and intervening in grain trade.
At the same time, through the Federation of Industry and Commerce and industry associations, the inventory statistics of large and small grain stores in the city that are engaged in grain wholesale and retail were carried out. In this way, the municipal government has a rough understanding of Guangzhou's bulk grain reserves, traffickers, and local wholesalers.
The total brown rice inventory of retailers is approximately 2600 tons. This number can supply the entire Guangzhou market for approximately one month.
According to the city government's past population estimates, 2600 tons cannot sustain even one month. However, Lin Baiguang believes that the past estimates are unscientific. Although the total population estimate is not much different from the statistics, the amount of food eaten by each person per month is 14 kilograms.
It’s too high. First of all, the elderly and children cannot eat so much. Secondly, 11 kilograms per month is barely enough for urban residents. More than half of the city’s poor people account for this, and their daily food intake cannot reach the level of 11 kilograms per month.
.In addition, most of the large households in Guangzhou had a considerable amount of grain in storage - this was common practice at the time. Large households often stocked up enough grain to last the whole family for two to three months. In addition, they could also obtain grain supplies from tenants in the suburbs.
Food supply was not a problem. Since the household registration of large gentry households also included a large number of slaves, with the population of each household ranging from twenty to thirty to several hundred, it can be said that a considerable part of the supply pressure was relieved.
In addition, in the past, the government granaries left by one prefecture and two counties in Guangzhou confiscated grain from the "reverse production", which totaled 700 to 800 tons. Part of this grain has been allocated to Guangzhou
The city government’s personnel salaries and funds have been used. There are still about 200 tons.
In addition to these local grains, the warehouses in Guangzhou Great World and warehouses on Hong Kong Island also store 1,000 tons of brown rice shipped from Southeast Asia and Hainan in the past three months. This is the trump card in the hands of Liu Xiang and the Ministry of Finance.
The purpose is to deal with grain speculation.
Every major currency reform is almost always accompanied by a frenzy of speculation on food and other daily necessities. Especially in the case of Guangzhou, even Liu Xiang, who has never been a businessman, knows that it is a good opportunity for food speculation.
Guangdong's grain needs to be supplied by Guangxi. June and July in Guangdong and Guangxi are the time for early rice harvest. In previous years, grain prices should have dropped by this time, but Guangdong itself is short of grain, and Guangxi is still under the rule of the Ming Dynasty - Wuzhou has set up
The water card strictly prohibits all ships from traveling up and down - the grain trade through Wuzhou has also stopped. Under normal circumstances, just the news of the suspension of grain water transportation in Wuzhou is enough to cause grain prices to skyrocket.
Fortunately, the Senate received reciprocation from the Chaoshan Grain Gang in banning tooth merchants and clearing the teeth's debts. Although the Chaoshan Gang's grain prices in the market increased slightly, they remained stable. The Chaoshan Gang also used its own resources.
Taking advantage of the merchant gang network, grain is transported from other places in Guangdong to supply Guangzhou. This greatly reduces the pressure on grain supply. This allows Chen Ce, who is fully in charge of economic and monetary policy in Guangzhou, not to use reserves on a large scale, but to occasionally throw out small amounts through cooperatives.
The increase in food prices under food suppression.
However, it is not enough to rely solely on the "returns" of the Chaoshan Gang. Business ethics are profit-oriented. They are sacrificing profits now, not only out of gratitude, but also because they know that the violent machine of the Senate is far from comparable to that of the Ming Dynasty. However,
Once the profits are large enough, neither conscience nor fear will be a problem. Therefore, the Senate itself must be based on curbing speculation and ensuring currency value.
In addition to storing a large amount of grain in Hong Kong Island, the Planning Institute also transports salt, cotton and linen cloth, dried seafood and tea from various regions to Hong Kong Island, which can be transferred to Guangzhou at any time to stabilize prices.
In order to have enough channels for distribution, in addition to batch channels, in terms of retail channels, commercial cooperatives, Dachang, and Wanyou opened more than 40 branches across the city of Guangzhou through accepting offers, direct purchases, etc., and the retail network basically covers
In the entire urban area of Guangzhou and major towns in its suburbs, in order to ensure supply to towns and villages, twenty mobile vending ships were refitted, all equipped with shop assistants and supply sources, and went to the countryside to sell goods in basically peaceful towns. Zheng Shangjie instructed the vending ships to also
Acquire rural local products according to market conditions to further activate the rural economy and prepare for the transfer of money to the countryside. (To be continued.) 8