Thousands of sparks

Chapter 177 Crazy August

When a worker-turned-factory manager turns himself into a capitalist, and his appearance is even uglier than a real capitalist, the workers often give such a person a special title - "scab".

If you simply take this imperial word apart and understand it, you can think of it as a combination of the prefix "traitor" plus the root of "slave" and the ending of "bribery".

The word scab comes from the ancient imperial language, and refers specifically to those traitors among the slaves who were bought by the bandit army to sabotage the rebellion or sell information during the slave rebellion.If one had to find a synonym in Dusand's mind, scab might be translated as "Song Jiang".

Just as the priests hated heresy, and the empire was hostile to the alliance, any group would naturally have extreme hostility towards individuals or organizations that betrayed itself—for the workers, Yuri was a complete traitor.

No matter how you look at it, Yuri, who was born and raised by workers, should stand in the camp of workers.But now, the complete and undisguised betrayal was nakedly displayed in front of everyone.This kind of betrayal was so thorough that the first reaction of many workers was to doubt—wondering whether they had wrongly blamed the factory manager who was raised by the workers.

In any case, betrayal is not always a glorious thing.Even if you really want to be a scab, you should at least choose a relatively safe method and do it in a way that doesn't attract much attention, right?
Those who also doubted their own ears and fell into shock were the members of the Central Special Branch who had been dispatched to the Russel Gear Factory in advance, and Schultz who was on the front line in person.

Schulz entered the Russel Gear Works targeting grassroots representatives of the workers.After all, he is old, and his specialty is "communication and persuasion" rather than planning.Such objective conditions determine that his most suitable position should be to unite the workers, rather than being a target of workers' resentment.

What's more, after a brief surprise, Schultz suddenly discovered that there seemed to be nothing wrong with this.

Cultivating a group of workers who can see the status quo clearly and realize that they are being exploited first requires a more favorable environment.Originally in the case of the Russel Gear Factory, such an "environment" could only be created by those few members of the Special Division who were going to be targets.But now, an enthusiastic old factory manager has solved all the problems for them.

When they first learned that some exploitation would be deliberately created, the members of Teco had a heavy psychological burden.After all, this kind of thing is really not a good thing.Exploiting workers against their own conscience, and then forcing them to be filled with anger... Maybe the intention is good, but in the process, countless people will fall into poverty and unsustainable.

Now, with Yuri's enthusiastic help, he gave a "perfect" solution, and the Teko members who sneaked into the factory quickly reached a consensus.

In order to thank Director Yuri for his timely assist, everyone decided to prepare the best ending for the old factory manager—it would be too long and painful to be hanged on the street lamp, so he should be shot directly.

Soon, a protest organized by the workers began.

To be honest, Central Teco didn't put much effort into organizing workers' activities. On the contrary, it was the workers' own organizational ability that really surprised the Teco members.In just two days, the workers in each workshop quickly completed the division of labor.Literate workers counted members and drew up slogans, while others planned and executed strikes.

In order to maximize the safety of the workers involved in the strike and their families, the members of the Central Special Branch quickly intervened and formulated a more detailed strike plan for them.From the parade route, to the strike method, to the purpose they want to achieve - a well-planned large-scale strike is gradually taking shape.

On the other hand, the financial procurement department of Olin Development Bank began to purchase options.

In fact, obtaining leverage to execute cross-market disruption tactics was much easier than Lorraine initially expected.After the successful acquisition of Olin Commercial Bank, Olin Development Bank quickly received olive branches from other banks established in Olin.These banks have expressed that in order to cooperate with Olin Development Bank in absorbing public deposits, they are willing to provide Olin Development Bank with a large amount of low-interest funds to show their sincerity.

The funds sent to your door should not be in vain.Olin Development Bank quickly accepted this large amount of cash with a smile, and began to pretend to participate in the "Discussion Conference on the Standardization of the Public Deposit-taking Industry" jointly initiated by more than a dozen Olin Banks.At the same time, the securities industry department of Olin Development Bank, which has just completed the takeover, began to purchase coal orders due next month.

The production of coal is relatively stable - on the one hand, the amount of coal that can be mined by each mine is about the same each year, on the other hand, it is now the off-season of coal consumption in Aolin.Ordinary people or aristocrats have very little demand for using coal for heating, and other metal smelting factories have not received particularly huge orders at present-everything is fine with the Imperial Navy, and there is no plan to expand rapidly.

Therefore, the price of coal has been falling all the way, and at the same time, other traders in the market are not willing to buy options in large amounts. Relatively stable and controllable" trading opportunities.

However, the current coal price has been falling all the way, and the market demand is weak.For many companies, instead of buying options, it is actually better to contact coal mines directly and buy spot coal directly from them.

At the same time, in order to maximize the "use efficiency" of funds, the owners of many smelting factories even deliberately reduced the coal inventory in the factories to the point where they were only enough for the factories to use for five days.

As for the funds... the vast majority of them are deposited into the Olin Development Bank.

No way, who made Olin Development Bank the only one among all the banks currently accepting public deposits that can guarantee the deposit and withdrawal business at any time?
The smelter's deposits became one of the main ammunition with which the Olin Development Bank began its offensive, and their response would also be the prelude to the beginning of this war.

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On August [-]th, the imperial city of Aolin was scorching hot.On the stock exchange in the imperial city, the September coal futures price, which had remained calm, suddenly fluctuated slightly upwards.

The fluctuation level is not very large, only 0.1%.However, the transaction volume was enough to attract the attention of some participants—someone bought September coal futures worth 12 gold pounds at one time in the Imperial City Exchange. The futures price is one-tenth of the market price of 13p per pound.

In other words, someone bought 320 million pounds of September coal futures in one go in early August.Although the total amount is not large, the occurrence of this kind of transaction itself is a bit strange.

None of the traders who can survive in the futures trading market are simple-minded fools.They quickly began to inquire about the news - did the Ministry of the Navy have a new shipbuilding plan?The purchase order of 320 pounds of coal is not too large, but it is not a small amount either—the large smelters are technologically advanced, and the average smelting of 2000 pounds of pig iron requires about 960 pounds of ore and 760 pounds of Coal or so.

This is roughly equivalent to the fuel required for 660 million pounds of pig iron.Converted into the weights and measures that Du Sande is familiar with, it is [-] tons.

For the Imperial City Stock Exchange, the fuel consumption of [-] tons of pig iron is not a big deal, but this tendency still makes everyone a little concerned.

What is even more concerning is that the price of iron ore futures in September did not fluctuate with coal futures.In fact, the trend of various industrial mineral sands is still very stable.It was so stable that people doubted that this 12 gold transaction was just an "accidental transaction" that occurred because a certain trader misheard the boss's instructions.

On August 24, after confirming that neither the navy nor the army had any plans to increase their equipment recently, there was another large transaction in the Imperial City Stock Exchange.The transaction amount this time was 1.2 gold pounds.Affected by this transaction, the price of coal futures for September delivery rose by [-]%.

On August 68, the September coal futures traded at Huangcheng Securities Exchange was [-] gold pounds. The price of September coal rose rapidly from [-]p to [-]p per pound.

Affected by the transaction, the price of the ship's position for transporting goods from the mining colony to Olin increased by 1%.

On August [-], when everyone started to pay attention to the transaction, Olin Development Bank stopped buying and began to sell some of the September coal futures that had already been bought.The traders suddenly felt that they had seen through the truth - this was an attempt by some traders to increase coal prices through centralized purchases, and then turn around and sell them to make a profit.

On August [-]th and [-]th, the September coal futures price returned to the level of [-]p per pound.And there were traders who started shorting coal—the futures they were shorting were all borrowed from Olin Development Bank.

On August 220th, under Lorraine's instructions, the Olin Development Bank made another move.They bought September coal futures of [-] million gold pounds from the market in a single day.The price of September coal futures rose to nineteen pence a pound in an instant.

On August 350, the transaction was 520 million pounds.On August 45, the transaction was [-] million gold pounds.By August [-], the price of coal futures on the Imperial City Exchange had risen to [-] pence per pound.All traders were panicking looking for reasons why these transactions could be established - there were even rumors that Imperial University invented a machine that could turn coal into gold, which led to such a large-scale coal buying trend.

By August 1000, the Olympian Development Bank had purchased September coal futures worth £30 million.There was about half of the ammunition left in Lorraine's hand.

Just as the market was anxiously preparing for a new crazy trading day, another news completely detonated the entire Olin Financial Circle.

Oilon's largest engineering gear factory, the Russel Gear Factory, broke out in a strike wave. The workers announced that all production at the Russel Gear Factory will be suspended from now on—including all orders that will be delivered to customers starting from August [-]. All deliveries will be stopped.

On August 62th, Lorraine did not make a move.The price of coal futures for September delivery was directly raised to [-] pence per pound with the participation of other traders.

On August 22, Olin Development Bank very generously agreed to the short-seller's purchase of 140 million pounds of September coal futures at a price of "200 pence per pound of coal".In this transaction, a short-seller's gross loss on a pound of coal orders reached a staggering 120 sevenpence.The coal futures price on the market has soared to the level of 160 pence per pound.

Calculated according to the current price, the futures held by Olin Development Bank have already made a profit of 563.81%, and the official attack...has just begun.

(End of this chapter)