Karl nodded. “That’s one of the reasons that money keeps flowing into the USE. A constitutional monarchy is less likely to, ah, insist on loans. Which, oddly enough, makes it easier for Gustav to get loans.”
“Back to the point,” Sarah said. “Anything Karl invests in Austria-Hungary is potentially subject to seizure. For that matter, once we’re married anything I invest here is potentially subject to seizure. Unless we are real careful, anyway. If Judy and Vicky both think it won’t work without heavy investment from us, then it won’t work without that investment. So I don’t see a way of doing it.”
“Keep your money in the USE, darling,” Karl said. “We may need it if we end up having to run for our lives.” He grinned. “Besides, I sort of like the idea of being a kept man.”
“That’s right, Sis,” Judy said. “That way if you get bored, you can trade the Ken Doll here in on a more anatomically correct model.”
“Don’t call him that,” Sarah said. “Besides he’s fully anatomically correct.”
“Do tell!” Hayley said, “and I want all the juicy details.”
Sarah felt herself turn bright red.
“Help me, Trudi!” Karl put his hands to his cheeks in an overdone imitation of a melodrama ingénue. “These lascivious up-timer girls are treating me like a piece of meat.”
Trudi snorted. “Up-timers are prudes.
“The point is, Vienna needs this,” Trudi said, clearly trying to bring the discussion back on the track that Sarah realized the down-time girl had been pushing for since the first question. Trudi, Sarah realized, was a very bright young woman, probably brighter than she was. “Vienna needs it bad. Not Emperor Ferdinand, not the upper crust of Vienna, whatever they call themselves, although they will benefit too. But Vienna needs it. The small crafters. The people coming in from the farms, the tailors, the bakers. All of those need this. They need work. We can provide work.”
“All right. Trudi’s right,” Karl said. “And if it requires me to put skin in the game, as you girls call it, I’ll put skin in the game.”
Sarah saw that Trudi had won the point. “All right. If you’re going to do this, you’re at least going to do it right. Susan, I’m going to need your computer and I’m going to need price points . . .”
Sarah went through what she was going to need to determine how much stock they could issue, money they could create, based on what they were going to have to sell. In a number of ways it was like figuring out how much you could afford to borrow for a capital investment like a house or a tractor. But it also had to involve how much of an influx of money the local economy could absorb. Over the next days and weeks, that second assessment would increase by an order of magnitude. It wasn’t the Viennese economy that was a constraining factor. Vienna was on the Danube and a major north/south trade route. New cash introduced in Vienna would be absorbed by the greater economy, just as had happened around the Ring of Fire in 1632 and 1633 . . . but faster. All that would come later, though.
“Wait a minute,” Judy said. “All that’s fine, Sarah, but in the meantime we need to make sure that people will take it. The American dollar went over so well partly because people looked at it as a piece of artwork, an engraving. They didn’t know Abe Lincoln from Abe Vigoda or George Washington from Curious George, but they could see the quality of the engraving. They could see the detail. You guys have seen the gold backs.” She was referring to the paper money printed by the Holy Roman Empire, now the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The printing sucked. They were printed in yellow and black ink on beige paper, and the yellow ink was barely visible. That applied to all of the notes, the reichsthaler, the goschen and the pfennig. It even applied to the new “mark” note that was to be the worth of a Cologne mark of silver. “We can’t have that. We need something that will be really hard to counterfeit, and we need it to be visually impressive.”
“So what do you want to do?” Susan asked.
“I want to let Heather Mason back in Grantville know what we want and have her come up with designs. You know she’s tied into the whole art community. Then we’ll have plates made up of the hardest steel they can make and have them cut at one of the up-time machine shops.”
“That’s going to take time,” Hayley said. “I’m not all that sure how long Moses Abrabanel is going to continue to take our IOUs.”
“I’ll talk to Moses,” Karl said.
“I’ll write Heather,” Judy said, and the rest took their assignments.