The Viennese Waltz(79)

“So you got some CO2,” Hayley observed.

“Yes, but don’t tell the patent holder,” Herr Kreuger said. “He’ll have me in court.”

“Who bought the patent?” Hayley asked.

“Prince Gundaker von Liechtenstein bought the patent on the process for separating CO2.”

“Which way of separating CO2?” Hayley asked.

“Is there more than one?”

“Dozens,” Hayley said with a sad shake of her head.

“Well, I think the patent that Prince Liechtenstein bought covers them all.”

Hayley grimaced. “See what I mean, you guys?”

“Yes, I do,” Karl said. “It is a disaster waiting to happen. I will check on what patents my family has bought.”

* * *

After their refreshments, they wandered Race Track City for a bit longer, then met at another restaurant. This one had a private room, which was immediately made available for Fräulein Hayley and her friends.

The restaurateur spoke to Hayley quietly while the others were being seated. He looked concerned, so Judy asked about it when Hayley finally sat down. “What’s up, Hayley? Did he infringe on a patent or something?”

“Laugh all you like, Jude,” Hayley said, looking a bit depressed herself. “No, he didn’t. Yet. What he did have to do was add some more credit accounts. Which means he doesn’t have the cash to buy supplies. And with our agreement, that means Sanderlin-Fortney Investment Company is going to have to front him the money.”

“What’s all this about?” Sarah asked.

“Nobody in Vienna has any money,” Hayley said. “At least, none of our customers do.”

“Oh, yes. I was meaning to bring that up with you, Sarah. Hayley mentioned it before,” Judy said. “You were telling me about how Austria is broke. Could you explain to us what you were talking about.”

“Do you remember Mom’s ‘great sucking sound’ lecture?” Sarah said.

“I remember it,” Judy said. “I didn’t really understand it, but I remember it.”

Sarah looked around at the others. “Right after the Ring of Fire, what Mom and Dad were most afraid of was that we would trash the local economy by sucking all the money out of it. We avoided that by introducing the American dollar, but that was just locally. For the past four years almost, we’ve been sucking money out of the rest of Europe. That’s how our economy has grown so fast. Like China’s did, back up-time. But the down-time banking system isn’t up to shifting the money back and frankly most of Europe doesn’t have the credit to borrow the money. So the money goes to the manufacturers in the golden corridor, and all too much of it stays there.”

Sarah hesitated, clearly looking for words. “Europe does have stuff to sell and it has people who want to buy that stuff. But, there isn’t the cash and that makes figuring out what anything is worth hard. And that’s strangling the economies of every country, except the USE. And the Netherlands, sort of. The union   of Kalmar, a bit. Everybody isn’t suffering the same amount, but almost everybody is suffering.”

“So what is needed is more money?” Karl asked.

“Yes,” Sarah said. “But you’ve got to find a way of introducing it that won’t cause more problems than it heals.”

“What do you mean?” Judy asked.

“To put it bluntly,” Sarah said, looking at Karl, “most of the governments of Europe don’t have enough financial credibility to be able to add to the money supply without people losing confidence in the money. Even here, where they aren’t materially increasing the money supply, the shift to paper silver certificates has devalued the paper in spite of the fact that it’s backed by a consistent amount of silver and the crown claims to have the silver in its vaults to buy every silver certificate out there.”

“I think they actually do have enough, or at least close to it,” Karl said.

“It’s possible. From what I’ve been hearing, there has been little increase in the money supply, but there has been inflation. That effectively means that there is less money available. And that in turn means that every improvement in productivity makes things worse.”

“That makes no sense at all,” said Hayley. “Making things better for less has to be a good thing. Especially when there isn’t enough money.”

“It would seem that way, wouldn’t it?” Sarah agreed. “But it hasn’t worked that way. Not since the Ring of Fire. As long as the value of money was determined by the amount of silver or gold in the coin, the down-time economists were right. You sold your stuff abroad to get more silver and then used that silver to run your economy. And it was stable because you can measure the amount of silver in the coins.”