Petty looked at the intelligence officer from Lloyd's of London before him. "So it was the French buying Cane Sugar?"
Over the past three days, some 30,000 dan of Cane Sugar had been swallowed up by mysterious buyers each day. Petty had therefore hired Lloyd's to investigate their origins. The intelligence officer nodded. "Although the people conducting the transactions were all different, their funds were all transferred from the Bank of France."
Petty instead smiled.
"The French had finally lost their nerve. Good. This made things interesting."
He dismissed the men from Lloyd's, then immediately instructed his assistant to increase the amount of Cane Sugar released onto the market each day to 40,000 dan.
He knew full well that with France's financial resources, it was absolutely impossible for them to buy up the nearly one million dan of Cane Sugar in his hands.
That would require the astronomical sum of 300 million Francs. Even if France drained every bank in the country dry, they could not come up with that much.
Or if France truly intended to exhaust all its domestic liquid capital over Cane Sugar, then heaven truly favored England—the French would immediately suffer an economic crisis, followed by fiscal collapse.
Very soon, news from Paris confirmed his suspicions.
Sugar prices at the Paris Futures Exchange had remained fixed at 2 Shillings 6 penny per Pound. The French were clearly about to fight desperately.
The situation unfolded exactly as Petty had expected. After he released a total of 110,000 dan of Cane Sugar, the French buyers ran out of steam, and daily trading volume returned to around 6,000 dan.
Immediately afterward, sugar prices at the Paris Futures Exchange also fell to 2 Shillings 4 pence per Pound.
Petty gathered his subordinate officials and held a small celebration.
"It is