Days passed one after another.
The war north of the watch wall continued.
On top of that, every day brought news of countless new projects and factory construction fitting the new era.
Steel futures prices kept climbing.
As ti went on, it wasn’t just Foster Iron Mine—other small iron mines started seeing their order books explode too.
Even with practically every iron mine across the entire continent running at full capacity, constantly ramping up output, they still couldn’t seem to et market demand.
More and more people were buying up steel futures now.
Watching those who’d gotten in early make bank, new players just kept flooding in.
Originally steel cost less than two silver coins per pound. Now it had skyrocketed to about seven silver.
Heck, people weren’t just eyeing new steel anymore—the steel recycling market had gotten insanely busy too.
These recyclers would buy at prices slightly below market rate. Like when futures were trading at 7 silver coins, they’d buy at 6, then turn around and list a contract on the futures market for 9 silver coins with delivery a month out.
It was like they were printing money out of thin air.
"They’ve lost it. Really lost it. Everyone’s gone crazy."
Viscount Roster watched the market get more and more insane, muttering: "Human greed is terrifying!"
Originally he figured even if these people went nuts, they’d at least focus on ga mines like Foster Iron Mine—no matter what happened, they’d definitely end up with actual steel in the end.
But now?
These people didn’t seem to care at all whether they’d actually get delivery. They only cared about one thing—could they list an order on the futures market!
In this crazy atmosphere, so other well-known mining companies gradually erged.
Soon, a company called Enron Mining burst onto the scene.
Rumor had it this company had stumbled onto a massive open-pit mine. The scale was huge, so they bought tons of mining equipnt and started frantically digging up iron ore.
And they kept hiring workers and slaves.
Production ramped up daily.
In no ti, they’d beco the world’s second-largest mining company. There were even hints they might surpass Foster Iron Mine.
More importantly, this company was willing to accept absolutely ridiculous orders.
Like, say current monthly production was 10,000 pounds and next month’s projected production was 20,000 pounds—they’d straight-up sign contracts to deliver 20,000 pounds next month.
With the snowball effect helping them along, this naturally beca incredibly scary.
And as orders piled up more and more, Enron Mining submitted an application to list on the Dragon Stock Exchange.
"Sothing feels off to ." When Nidhogg brought this up with Viscount Roster, he seed helpless: "Should we let this company go public?"
"Don’t need to feel it out—this Enron Mining is totally a shell company." Viscount Roster said with a smile: "But we still gotta let them go public."
"Why?" Nidhogg was suddenly stunned.
"Because this will be our perfect opportunity to launch credit currency. When this Enron Mining gets exposed as a fraud at just the right mont, it can totally beco the straw that breaks the cal’s back."
Viscount Roster was suprely confident: "Of course, we still need to do so prep work."
"What?" Nidhogg felt like his brain wasn’t keeping up.
He really couldn’t follow Viscount Roster’s train of thought.
"Nothing much, just so strict managent regarding the chaos in the stock market. We need to get ready to make the financial market’s disorderly expansion beco orderly." Viscount Roster said with a smile.
In the stock market, there were actually tons of illegal trades, or rather, people making money through shady ans.
Like insider trading, or multiple people teaming up to manipulate stock prices, or other thods.
The stock exchange had been established for a while now. For ordinary people, this stuff didn’t matter much.
But for nobles and big rchants? They’d long since found countless loopholes and made fortunes.
Viscount Roster and the dragons had always treated the stock and bond exchanges as tools to absorb the gold and silver piled up in these rich people’s castle vaults.
Naturally they didn’t care how these people played dirty in the stock market. Under these circumstances, quite a few ordinary middle-class folks got screwed over, but there was nothing they could do about it.
Now, since these funds had a better place to go, naturally the stock market needed to beco reasonable and compliant.
"The stock market’s biggest purpose has always been providing funds to rchants who genuinely need to expand their operations. But now tons of nobles and rchants with terrible track records are making money through despicable, shaless thods."
Viscount Roster said cheerfully: "We should establish so rules and refuse these kinds of trades."
After saying that, he directly sent a docunt he’d prepared long ago to Nidhogg.
"You had this ready ahead of ti?"
Nidhogg looked at the docunt Viscount Roster sent over and couldn’t help being stunned. It had rule after rule, who knows how many, each one targeting a specific bad behavior.
"Naturally. When the stock exchange was first established, I already started constantly refining these rules. It just wasn’t the right ti before."
Viscount Roster was very confident: "These rules for the first version can totally correct most of the bad behaviors that appeared before."
"When these people realize making money in the stock market has gotten difficult, and their traditional investnt thods make money way too slowly—no, their traditional investnt thods can’t make money anymore, then their most likely move will be to throw..."
Nidhogg already understood what Viscount Roster ant.
This move was ant to force these crooked investors to dump all their funds into the futures market.
Then harvest them all together.
He could even imagine that once these rules started operating, countless funds would pour into the steel market and steel futures prices would skyrocket.
Nidhogg was even wondering if the dragons should also get in on this trade.
They could totally add fuel to the fire and make so money.
When exactly should Enron Mining be exposed as problematic?
"Let them go public before enforcing these rules. The first wave of investigations will target those investors’ violations, not the companies themselves. This’ll let them expand safely on the market for a while."
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