Church Financial status

fallsfromtrees wrote:

SYED wrote:I always figured at some point, merlin would use counterfieting the church currency. IT would be discovered and shatter the church ability to buy. One church dollar would be penies/cents or less of any other currency, potnetially even worse exchange rate. There is a kind of fake that can only be proven if they burn the notes right, real is one color, fake is another. One burned red, the other blue.
How much of the money is coinage, and what is paper?
Fake coind are coins made out of cheap metals, made to loo like a perfect copy of valuable coins, then overlaid by a thin layer of the valuablemetal it is supposed to be, say silver of gold.
The thing is the church is big in the traditional publishing and printing business. So they could be framed for the fake papers.

As I have said, I believe that virtually all of the money in circulation is coinage, not paper. What paper in circulation is effectively IOUs, with very limited transfer value. Therefore counterfeiting is not really possible except for the base metal coated by value. Unfortunately that requires electroplating, which requires electricity which is a big NO-NO for both sides.

I suppose you could use batteries, but finding that out would involve dabbling in forbidden knowledge, so I can't see the church doing it, and there is no need for EoC to do so. Besides which, if the EoC does do into electroplating, there are much better uses for it than counterfeiting church coinage.

evilauthor wrote:

TN4994 wrote:Have faith. We'll make good after we kill off all these heretics. Tell you what, I'll let you use those to buy land in Codisande.

Isn't that what they're ALREADY doing? I seem to recall that it's already mandatory to for people to accept Church IOUs at face value... at least when it comes DIRECTLY from the Church.

But Duchairne notes that said IOUs are already trading for well under their face value which he considered to be a bad thing. It's easy for the Church to compel people to take the IOUs at their face value when the Church is one of the parties in the financial transaction. But the Church has nowhere near the manpower to monitor and police every PRIVATE transaction unless they decommission the Army of God and turn every soldier in it into accountants... and that's probably STILL not enough.

Incognitia wrote:As long as the Church is going to survive in religious control of at least a portion of the mainland, people will still accept Church IOUs, albeit at a discount from face value.
Put it this way - the tithe in peacetime provided enough of a surplus to 1) fund the luxury and decadence of the Vicars and other high churchmen and 2) make substantial loans to secular figures including most of the Kings of Safehold.
Even though postwar tithe receipts will be lower - either Charis and Siddarmark have been pillaged or they are outside the CoGA structure - the Church will be making a lot of money which can be used to gradually pay down their debt. Britain had a national debt of over 250% of GDP at the end of the Napoleonic Wars - higher than after WW2 - and paid it down across the course of the 19th century. Bearing in mind that the British national debt was over 100% of GDP in the 1790s and built up over 20 years of fighting war around the world and subsidising allies, I would be surprised if the Church has anywhere near the same debt burden.
The key innovation which would make it practical for the Church to keep their debt under control would be consols or a close equivalent - instead of an IOU signed Rhobair Duchairn to be paid at war's end or thereafter, you get a bearer bond which will pay say 2% of it's face value every year until bought back by the church at face value. That makes church debt an income stream, not just an IOU and would keep up the face value. A higher rate than 2% might be necessary, but even at 5% or so it's in Duchairn's interests, because revenues from the Temple Lands and whatever tithes make it to Zion can fund the annuities on bond issues and he can spend easily ten times in bonds what he could in cash. Yeah, he's mortgaging the Church's future in order to fight the war right now, but the war is about the future of Safehold and God's Plan - what are a few decades of paying down the debt compared with that?

fallsfromtrees wrote:Since I haven't had my snippet fix in 13 days now, I have been re-reading the entire series. I found the following in AMF (Nov 893, chapter VI)

He didn’t know the precise value of the gold shipment awaiting his two ships, but he knew it was large. In fact, it was a substantial portion of Desnair’s annual tithe to Mother Church, actually.

I think this answers the question about whether or not they are shipping large quantities of gold around.

lyonheart wrote:Hi FallsFromTrees,

This text has been discussed before because the gold mines are in Desnar in the first place, so is this gold that was supposed to go to Zion, but is being returned to Geyra, or were they supposed to take it on to Port Home, etc?

Most believe it was going home to Geyra, yet the other text after the naval battle suggests the tithe is going to Zion, but will have to make other arrangements.

Is it just Desnar that sends gold this way, or did they use their few small galleys before the jihad?

Thanks for generating so many questions.

L

SYED wrote:Someone said that electroplating coins is not possible since electricity is involved. But was it not used to copper the ship hull, so to block boarers. Even if it is beyond known charis tech, it is a known tech so just another trade secret.

since the war is causeing financial trouble, then cash transfers are more important. if they can target those shipments, could they make them turn on themselves.