The facts proved that Prime Minister Granville had been thinking far too optimistically. The biggest force behind the soaring gold prices was the British financial conglomerates; the speculators were merely pawns charging at the front in plain sight.
Did these financial conglomerates not know the consequences of blindly driving up gold prices? Obviously not. They were professionals, not amateurs like those in the Cabinet Government.
Yet they did it for profit all the same. Even the Granville Cabinet Government's decision to inflate gold prices and obstruct the Vienna Government's gold purchases bore the shadow of those conglomerates.
But the United Kingdom was not the United States. Financial conglomerates could not yet cover the sky with one hand, so they acted with great subtlety. They merely bribed members of the government think tank to put forward the proposal, never stepping directly into the spotlight.
That was nothing. In history, there had even been people who published articles in newspapers regularly read by Cabinet ministers, thereby influencing British politics.
There was no helping it. Politicians elected through elections could not possibly be masters of every trade. In many fields, they were outsiders, on the same level as countless onlookers munching melon seeds. It was truly not difficult to fool them.
With this kind of subtle, rain-moistening-silently approach, politicians often did not even realize they had been fooled. Quite a few idiotic policies were made this way.
Naturally, the conglomerates had not driven up gold prices just to earn that tiny spread. More importantly, they wanted to use it to strike at their competitors.
As gold prices rose, the value of the pound rose with them, naturally affecting domestic industry and commerce. Large, well-established enterprises could weather such short-term fluctuations.
For most small and medium capitalists, however, it was like taking a trip