[London, England – 3:08 PM, 21st of July, 1929]
London had become considerably less pleasant over the past few months.
Not because London itself had changed particularly much. The smog was still miserable, the streets were still crowded, and the taxis still seemed to operate according to a set of traffic laws known only to God and whichever lunatic had designed the roads. What had changed was the atmosphere.
I had spent the better part of the afternoon sitting around a long table in London with approximately two hundred people whose entire purpose in life was to make sure my companies didn't get eaten alive when everyone else's started collapsing.
Calling them 'my economic intelligence organisation' sounded considerably more dramatic than it actually was.
They weren't spies. At least, most of them weren't.
They were accountants, economists, industrial buyers, lawyers, engineers, bankers, statisticians, shipping specialists, commodity traders, insurance brokers, market analysts, procurement officers and enough people who understood the incredibly tedious details of industrial supply that it made me question how autistic one had to be to enjoy spreadsheets.
The important thing was that they weren't simply watching my own companies. They were watching everyone connected to them. A man three seats down from me was explaining the latest arrangements we'd been negotiating with several suppliers.
"We've managed to secure the long-term contracts with the three principal chemical suppliers," he said. "The contracts are slightly more expensive than buying at spot prices. They deviances are anywhere between six and nine per cent, depending on the material."
He nodded. "And after several suggestions we have made sure the important part is the collateral provisions, so if they default, we have claims against specific industrial assets."
I nodded. That was the entire point. It was more expensive than simply buying whatever I needed from the cheapest supplier every month, but I wasn't particularly interested in maximising this year's profit. I was interested in still having a factory capable of producing anything five years from now.
"Good," I said. "Keep doing that."
There was a pause before another man spoke. "We've also identified forty-seven tertiary suppliers which represent potential bottlenecks."
"Forty-seven?" I muttered back as if contemplating the scale.
"Forty-seven that we consider significant enough to monitor directly. There are considerably more beneath them." I gestured for him to continue. "Twenty-three are incredibly badly leveraged. Seven could become insolvent within six months of an economic downturn."
"If one of those companies fails and it threatens one of our production chains, we buy it. If it doesn't, we let somebody else deal with it." I leaned back in my chair. "And I want the same principle applied to the companies we've been approaching for minority positions."
One of the lawyers opened his notebook. "We've identified thirty-one companies that fit your criteria, nine in Britain, four in Canada, and eighteen in the US, where a capital injection could give us significant influence without requiring outright ownership when they are desperate.
My empire had already long grown beyond the point I could manage it alone. That's why these people were so important; I had even bought an office building in London to run everything out of.
Perhaps the most important difference was that I was no longer trying to make money. I was trying to make sure that money, factories, suppliers, patents, transportation networks and raw materials continued existing when everyone else started running out of them due to a lack of sufficient demand, causing the economy of scale to collapse, which in turn caused a shortage but not a big enough one to bring back the economies of scale.
The Great Depression wasn't going to kill every company. It was going to kill companies that couldn't survive long enough. A perfectly viable business could fail because its customers stopped paying. A factory could close because its bank refused to renew a loan. A manufacturer could collapse because its supplier went bankrupt. A supplier could collapse because its supplier failed. A perfectly profitable company could be dragged underwater by a single broken link in a chain.
I intended to own the chain and invent vertical integration decades earlier.
I looked around the room.
"Anything else?"
I was the lunatic sitting at the head of the table who had apparently decided that a market making record-breaking returns was a reason to become increasingly suspicious of it.
But I'd seen what happened next. The problem with knowing the future wasn't that you knew every detail. I didn't. I couldn't possibly. It was that sometimes you knew enough.
It wasn't like I could even remember the exact date off the top of my head, only that it was the later half of this year. But I knew this couldn't continue.
I mean, in the last two months my Wall Street people had managed to turn the remaining ten million I was letting them speculate with into twenty-five million on one particularly insane series of trades.
One hundred and fifty per cent in two weeks. I had stared at the number for several minutes the first time I'd seen it. Not because I was impressed but because I was horrified.
There was no rational reason for five million pounds to become twenty-five million pounds in fourteen days through ordinary investment.
Now that the meeting was over, the room emptied gradually until I was alone with a stack of financial reports in front of me.
The funny thing was that the majority of my wealth didn't actually come from patents or royalties anymore. The patents had made me rich. They had given me the initial capital, funded the factories, which in turn got enough companies interested that they bought the licence.
But now?
The income I got from them was not all that much.
I'd put roughly fifty million pounds into the Kunming-Guangdong railway, which was about 30% the cost of construction. Technically though, the Chinese government owed me fifty million pounds plus interest. The railway itself belonged to the Chinese government.
The money had effectively gone into the railway, with the bond secured against the resulting infrastructure.
It was complicated. It was also, from a Western banker's perspective, about as trustworthy as asking a particularly suspicious goat to guard your wallet.
Nominally, the bond was worth considerably more than fifty million once interest was included.
Practically?
A bank wasn't going to treat it like a gilt. I could borrow about thirty million on it, which I had given to Morgan since, even in the event the bank seizes it, I wouldn't have really taken a loss since the railway existing was the important part. That was fine.
Another twenty million had gone directly into industrialisation efforts in Yunnan. Mostly in the form of loans to a mixture of local businessmen and ones towards entrepreneurs and experts to entice them to come.
That made the money significantly less secure, but again, if none of those were paid back, I couldn't really care. I'd reached the point where losing an entire investment portfolio wouldn't even be a problem but let alone an existential event.
The irony was that the market kept going up. Which meant my short positions were becoming increasingly expensive, so I was making less money from being right.
That was the sort of sentence only the stock market could produce. The remaining American assets were worth approximately forty million pounds. I'd already removed a substantial amount. Another forty million pounds had been brought back to Britain.
Twenty million of that was essentially my emergency fund. It wasn't there to sit in a vault looking impressive. It was there to keep my factories running. If a bank refused credit, I could pay wages, and if suppliers collapsed, I could buy their inventory.
The other twenty million was held in gold-backed instruments. I had no immediate intention of touching them. I had a plan for those. After all money could only sit idle if it was serving a purpose by doing so.
Then there were the physical businesses. About ten million pounds' worth; Rubber, Steel, chemical production, petrochemicals, manufacturing, warehouses, and various industrial concerns I'd accumulated over the years.
And their was about a million pounds' worth of land which, at present, was not particularly exciting. Random pieces of land.
Some in Britain. Some in America. Some overseas. Most of it was practically worthless.
At present.
There were even enormous quantities of what everyone regarded as useless desert.
I should probably just buy all of Guyana at this point. It was a holy land of oil and bauxite.
I sighed.
One thing at a time.
Finally, there was the intellectual property.
My original fortune.
The thing that had started all of this.
Color film.
Synthetic rubber.
Chemical processes.
Industrial techniques.
Various manufacturing patents.
The list had become absurdly long.
The patents were currently generating around four million pounds a year in licensing fees and royalties.
Actually, no. Last year's figure had been approximately £4.3 million. This year's projection was closer to £6.2 million. And it was still growing. That money was mostly being reinvested. Which meant the patents themselves were worth considerably more than their annual income suggested. If I sold the entire portfolio, the purchaser would be buying the future income stream. At a rough valuation, all of my patents and intellectual property rights were probably worth around thirty-five million pounds.
So, adding it all together...
I stared at the numbers.
Seventy million in China.
Forty million in America.
Forty million in British reserves and emergency assets.
Ten million in physical industrial businesses.
One million in land.
Thirty-five million in intellectual property.
Roughly one hundred and ninety-six million pounds.
Give or take.
That wasn't even counting various smaller holdings, cash balances, equipment, inventories, minority stakes and assets that were difficult to value cleanly.
I sat back.
One hundred and ninety-six million pounds.
Just over eight hundred million dollars.
I didn't know the exact exchange rates by the modern day but it would be well over ten billion.
Christ.
I was rich.
I mean, obviously I had known I was rich.
You don't accidentally build factories across three continents without noticing. But it wasn't like I had ever really counted it out until this point, and there was a strange psychological difference between knowing you were wealthy and actually sitting down and adding everything together.
I wasn't the richest man in the world. But I was getting there.
I was probably somewhere in the top hundred richest people alive. And most of that wealth hadn't come from the patents anymore.
"Compounding growth is the death of capitalism," I muttered to myself. As I continued to read.
And I was spending a frankly ridiculous amount of money making sure that when the rest of the world's economic machine seized up, mine didn't.
I looked back down at the reports.
The funny thing was that none of the numbers actually felt like wealth.
Not anymore.
The fifty million in China wasn't money sitting in my account.
The American investments were mostly being moved around.
The British reserves existed specifically because I expected to need them.
The industrial companies needed capital.
The patents needed defending.
The factories needed workers.
The land was mostly waiting.
The Chinese businesses were still being built.
Everything had a purpose.
I wasn't sitting on millions of pounds.
I was sitting on millions of pounds' worth of future problems.
I smiled to myself.
"Well," I muttered, gathering the papers together, "at least I've diversified."
I needed more. For a moment I contemplated how greedy that was, but it was the truth. I needed so much more. Let's hope morgan handles the crash properly and makes bank for me.