Paris.
In the study on the second floor of Versailles Palace, Joseph happily leafed through the report the Security Bureau had just delivered.
[October 2. The Brunswick royal family sold £50,000 worth of British Government Bonds. The discount rate in the British Bonds market rose to 1.13%...][October 4. The Wurzburg government sold £30,000... the discount rate rose to 1.15%...]
[October 6. Salzburg sold £30,000... Mecklenburg sold £50,000... Cologne sold £50,000... Saxony sold... the discount rate rose to 1.4%... The Security Bureau's financial advisers believed that the northern German States had chosen to sell early in order to limit their losses, so Major Hart stopped several other states from continuing to sell British Bonds.]
[October 7. Oldenburg sold...]
This was the tactic Joseph had devised to strike at British Government Bonds—keep selling them publicly, steadily heating up the market's expectation that British Bonds would fall. Meanwhile, the Rating Agencies would follow by lowering the credit ratings of British Bonds, ultimately creating a situation where investors would not dare buy them lightly.
And in order to stabilize confidence in the Government Bonds market, the British Government could only keep buying up those sell-offs.
This would, on the one hand, force the British Government to spend vast amounts of cash and increase its fiscal pressure—even the new Government Bonds sold in the second half of this year might not cover the money spent swallowing up the old ones.
Of course, the British could simply fire up the printing press, which was exactly what Joseph wanted to see even more. The United Kingdom had already developed considerable imported inflation under high sugar prices. If they then added reckless money printing, their inflation figures would soon soar into the sky. This would also greatly wear down the United Kingdom's strongest "weapon"—its financial endurance.
On the