The second radio message was more serious. He wished Uriel Abrabanel still lived here. He would know what to do. Karl didn't. Karl was among the most conservative of the Fourth of July Party and had considerable sympathy for William Wettin's positions. To be honest, Mike Stearns scared him and he had almost followed Quentin Underwood to the Crown Loyalists; would have if it hadn't looked like he would lose his senate seat if he did. Not that any of that mattered. The important point to Karl Schmidt was that his stepson was in the Third Division and in charge of the Third Division Exchange Corps. Which meant that Third Division's financial problems would reflect badly on the family and there were blood ties involved. He didn't have any answers for David, but he sent back that he would help if he could.
****
There were other messages; to the Board of Directors of OPM, to the presidents and owners of companies financed by OPM. Generators, power tools, nuts, bolts, plow blades, knives, ax heads, and more got diverted to the Third Division Exchange Corps warehouses while they were still not sure where they would be shipped. All while David Bartley didn't know where he would get the money to pay for them.
Then there were the requests for help from the finance community. Because, though David didn't have any real idea what the answer might be, he did think it would be in the area of finance and economics.
"So, how do you finance an army when the government isn't going to pay it?" someone asked.
"Well, the obvious answer is to borrow the money. And the government may eventually pay the bills, though I would disallow some of the expenses General Stearns has claimed," said Fredric Brum.
The questioner just looked at him. "You think Mike Stearns is cooking the books?"
"No, of course not. I simply think he is being over-generous with the government's money in compensating the victims of war." Then he sniffed. "Not that it makes any difference. All the government will do is pay the bills with IOUs." Brum believed that gold and silver were money and nothing else was. He was a good mathematician and learning to be a good programmer and socially quite liberal. But he stayed up nights worrying about what was going to happen when people finally realized that the vaunted American dollar was just a piece of paper with I owe you another piece of paperwritten on it in fancier wording. Everyone in the statistics department of the treasury knew that.
"Shh, Herr Brum. Someone might hear you. The problem with borrowing money is that with the way things are right now, a lot of the big lenders would be afraid of how the government would react. They could issue preferred stock, I guess."
****
"Say, Fonzie," David said as he entered the tent.
Frenczil Becker gritted his teeth theatrically and David grinned. Frenczil (the Fonz) Becker sported a black leather jacket, used goop on his hair, and put on tough-guy airs. Not, David would freely admit, without some justification. The Fonz was a lawyer who had joined the Third and become the executive officer of a rifle company. He had distinguished himself in combat and was respected by your average CoC tough. With the formation of the Exchange Corps, he had been seconded to it part-time. That is, in addition to his other duties. He had, in fact, been the one who drew up the actual papers of incorporation that had been signed by General Stearns.
"What do you know," David continued, "about the laws and penalties involved in issuing money or money-like stuff."
"What laws and penalties?"
"Well, someone at the treasury suggested we issue preferred stock and sell it locally but I'm afraid that might be too close to issuing money, so I wanted to find out about the applicable laws."
"And again I ask 'what laws'? There was some talk of making it illegal to issue money, but it would have stepped on too many toes. Rights granted in perpetuity to towns and nobles. It was hard enough to get them to swallow that their taxes had to be paid in USE dollars."
"You mean the Exchange Corps could just issue money?"
"Sure, but who would take it?"
David turned around and left the tent shaking his head. This would require thinking about. He had known that towns and cities were still issuing their own money, that John George and Georg Wilhelm had both issued paper money that had never been worth much, but he had assumed that they had special permission, or been grandfathered in. Mostly he'd ignored the matter, insisting on doing business in American dollars. Which was getting to be a pretty standard clause in contracts in the USE these days.
****
"Run that by me again, Lieutenant." Jeff Higgins shook his head. "I'm having some trouble with the logic involved."
David managed to hide his irritation at Colonel Higgins' forgetting his new rank yet again. He knew Jeff didn't mean anything by it. What was more difficult was trying to explain money matters to someone as ignorant of them as most people were "Well . . ."
He sat up straighter on the stool in a corner of the Hangman Regiment's HQ tent. "Let's try it this way. The key to the whole thing is the new scrip. What I'm calling the divisional scrip."
Higgins shook his head again. "Yeah, I got that. But that's also right where my brain goes blank on account of my jaw hits the floor so hard. If I've got this right, you are seriously proposing to issue currency in the name of the Third Division?"
"Exactly!" David said, without adding that they had been doing essentially the same thing every time they had issued a chit. "We'll probably need to come up with some sort of clever name for it, though. 'Scrip' sounds, well, like scrip."
"Worthless paper, in other words," provided Thorsten Engler. He, like Bartley and Colonel Higgins himself, was also sitting on a stool in the tent. The flying artillery captain was smiling. Unlike Jeff, he found Bartley's unorthodox notions to be quite entertaining.
"Except it won't be-which is why we shouldn't call it 'scrip.'"
"Why won't it be worthless?" asked Major Reinhold Fruehauf.
That question caught David up short because it was so basic and because he didn't have a clue how to explain to the major how money, all money, not just the Division scrip, got its value. The major was leaning casually against a tent pole. He was a good man and reasonably intelligent, but what gave money its value was an imponderable. "Why won't it be worthless? Because . . . Well, because it'll officially be worth something." Which was ridiculous, but explaining that "it would have value because it was perceived to have value, and being perceived to have value, it would buy stuff, which in turn would give it real value" was a bit beyond David's ability to articulate just at the moment.
The regiment's other battalion commander cocked a skeptical eyebrow. "According to who, Captain? You? Or even the regiment itself?" Major Baldwin Eisenhauer had a truly magnificent sneer. "Ha! Try convincing a farmer of that!"
"He's right, I'm afraid," said Thorsten. His face had a sympathetic expression, though, instead of a sneer. Engler intended to become a psychologist after the war; Major Eisenhauer's ambition was to found a brewery. Their personalities reflected the difference.
"I was once one myself," Engler continued. "There is simply no way that a level-headed farmer is going to view your scrip-call it whatever you will-as anything other than the usual 'promissory notes' that foraging troops hand out when they aren't just plundering openly. That is to say, not good for anything except wiping your ass."
David looked at them, totally lost in trying to explain that those level-headed farmers who would never accept scrip had been happily trading their grain for scrip since before Caesar was a pup. Scrip made out of metal not paper, granted. But that only made it scrip that wasn't even good for wiping your ass with. "But-but- " but how to explain to these good men who knew the world was flat and the sun went around it on a crystal sphere that the world was round and went rolling around the sun. "Of course, it'll be worth something. We'll get it listed as one of the currencies traded on the Grantville and Magdeburg money exchanges. If Mike-uh, General Stearns-calls in some favors, he'll even avoid having it discounted too much." He squared his slender shoulders. "I remind all of you that they don't call him the 'Prince of Germany' for no reason. I can pretty much guarantee that even without any special effort, money printed and issued by Mike Stearns will trade at a better value than a lot of European currencies."