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PeterZ
Fleet Admiral
Posts: 6432
Joined: Fri Apr 01, 2011 1:11 pm
Location: Colorado
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Kzt, There is quite a lot of civilian infrastructure left. That means civilian goods are available to sell to those Verge worlds that need to develop their civilian infrastructure. What the SKM can't do yet is build weapons and weapons' platforms. That means they can do business with all those Verge worlds as well as rebuild their military production. They can repatriate enough capital to rebuild their destroyed infrastructure but still need to invest excess cash flows outside the SKM or overheat their economy. Compare this dynamic to the SL. The League needs capital infusions to offset their lost Verge client state income. The coming chaos will make attracting foreign capital more expensive to attract. As a result, their economies will contract. A similar dynamic applies to the RF. The RF does have wealth to invest in other systems, but not the massive amounts of capital inflows the SEM enjoys from controlling 80% of the galaxy's WHJs. Bottom line is that the SEM must protect the Verge as a way to secure needed partners to maintain their own economic growth. Without the Verge to soak up excess cash, the SEM turns into Spain after discovering the New World. runsforcelery wrote:Nothing is being “hand waved away.”
The Star Empire’s economy is hurting . . . a lot. At the moment, the primary cash flow is going into rebuilding its orbital infrastructure, but there’s quite a lot of civilian infrastructure left. In fact, there's more than they really thought there was, and they are discovering that they can repurpose it to a greater extent than they expected. Not in the manufacture of military hardware, but in the production of military infrastructure from which the hardware can be rebuilt. At the moment, however, neither Manticore nor Grayson is producing new ships (or spares) or ammunition. Fortunately, as I believe I have pointed out earlier on the Forum, if not in the books (and I think it was in the books, as well), they had the “downtime” when they were waiting for negotiations that were then canceled, etc., during which they continued to produce missiles at maximum wartime rates and their missile stockpiles were decentralized. They are also discovering that they have more readily redirected industrial “slack” which can be dedicated to rebuilding in no small part because Lacoön Two has reduced the demand for export goods from the civilian sector which continues to exist. In other words, people who have been thrown out of work because the export industry has tanked are finding good-paying jobs in rebuilding what Oyster Bay blew up.
From the perspective of physical plant, Grayson is actually in rather better condition to recover than Manticore, in many ways. I realize that seems counterintuitive, but unlike Manticore’s orbital shipyards (which were also primary civilian industrial sites), Blackbird — the only part of the Grayson orbital infrastructure targeted — was solely the naval yard of the Grayson Space Navy. Some freighters were built there, but not in the last several T-years. When they were being built there, it was because Grayson had more free capacity (courtesy of the dispersed yards) than Manticore did at that time. What this means is that they took virtually a 100% hit on their naval/military building capability but the basic extraction industries, the industrial plant dedicated to consumer production, etc., is substantially closer to intact. I’m not saying they didn’t get hurt, or that they didn’t lose a lot of trained manpower they really, really need. I’m only saying their losses were much more focused in a specialized subcomponent of their total industrial structure.
Neither the Manticoran Alliance, nor the Republic of Haven, nor the Mesan Alignment counted on an alliance between Manticore, Grayson, Haven, and Beowulf when they were contemplating how long it would take to recover from the Yawata Strike. In essence, Beowulf is now producing the Grand Alliance’s ammunition. (“Now” in this case means about six months after Oyster Bay and a couple of months or so prior to the actual Beowulf secession plebiscite.) Production rates “now” are still fairly low, but they are beginning to ramp up. Actually building the new Manticoran hardware doesn’t present an enormous challenge to Beowulf’s industry, nor would it present one to the Solarian League, should the Solarian League, I dunno, find itself in a position to, oh, reverse-engineer the MDM, for example. It would be tougher for the League, in some ways, because the League wouldn’t have the advantage of the folks who were already actually building it before the Yawata Strike/Oyster Bay, but someplace like Technodyne could certainly manage it if they got their hands on working models. (Given the nature of Honorverse molecular circuitry — which assumes that mollycirc hardware is basically “programmed” into the base matrix, which can then be wiped, returning the matrix to a “blank slate” state and that military organizations failsafe their hardware with security protocols — getting working models is tougher for some bits and pieces than for others, of course.)
Manticore’s worst-case assumptions for rebuilding didn’t contemplate Beowulfan construction, as well as financial, assistance. Neither did the Star Empire — or the Mesan Alignment — in their wildest opium dreams contemplate that the Republic of Haven would be providing literally millions of construction workers to rebuild Manticore’s industry. So the labor force and the physical capacity to rebuild are present in ample measure. The financial aspect of it is more complicated, but the comparison to the UK at the end of World War II is somewhat suspect. (Except, perhaps, for the fact that both Haven and Beowulf are currently operating under the equivalent of “Lend-Lease” and that there is — or would be, if needed — the high likelihood that both those governments will simply write off most or all of their aid as a war expense much as the United States did after World War II.)
As far as current cash flow is concerned, Manticore is not permitting “toll-free” use of the Junction even to its allies’ merchant shipping. For that matter, it doesn’t permit “toll-free” use of the Junction to Manticoran merchant shipping; it simply permits its own shippers and those who belong to a “most favored nation” to pay substantially lower Junction fees.. And unlike the British Empire, the Manticoran Wormhole Junction isn’t going anywhere. Nobody (except your humble author) really knows what’s going to happen in the Solarian League post-war. It may dissolve into piracy and warlordism, and it may not. Even if it does, however, interstellar commerce is going to continue to move, both in physical goods and in financial transfers and transactions, and that means the Junction traffic is going to remain. The Star Empire of Manticore, even if it gives back every single wormhole it seized in Lacoön Two, still owns the Panama Canal, the Suez Canal, the Straits of Hormuz, the Straits of Gibraltar, the Northwest Passage, and the Bosporus. Indeed, if the League dissolves into a hotbed of piracy, use of the Junction and the “feeder” warp bridges will only go up, because that’s how you get from one well defended/patrolled (probably by the Star Empire and/or its allies) nexus to another well defended/patrolled nexus with zero possibility of interception by Bad People.
In short, Manticore’s postwar economic position will be even stronger than it was preclauses will gain war.
Now, about that economic business. As someone has pointed out, the insurance industry just took a truly cosmic hammering, although the “act of war/act of God” in some of those policies are going to provide at least limited fire escapes for the insurers who wrote them. Their pain will be the rest of the Star Empire’s economy’s gain, however, and even the insurers are unlikely to go under entirely (as a whole; some individual insurers definitely will collapse), given the diversification of their investment portfolios both inside and outside the Star Empire.
I invite you to remember that, as has been pointed out several places, both in the books and in discussion here on the Forum, Manticore has been sort of the equivalent of Zürich, the New York Stock Exchange, and the Cayman Islands, as well. The big cartels, like Hauptman’s, have enormously diversified holdings throughout interstellar space. The size of the Manticoran merchant marine and its non-military export industry pumped a very large and very steady stream of cash into the Star Kingdom which then had to be invested somewhere outsid e the Star Kingdom to prevent the economy from overheating. That was a pattern which had built up literally over centuries before the first Manticore-Haven war. The costs of that war were (you should pardon the phrase) astronomical, and as the war years dragged on, they began adversely affecting Manticore’s governmental revenue streams. The economy as a whole continued to grow. Indeed, it grew more rapidly during the war years that it had during peacetime, but a government which had always eschewed deficit spending (and had no need for it, given the Junction) found itself borrowing more and more heavily to finance its construction programs and growing military establishment. So, for the first time in several hundred T-years, the Manticoran national debt represents a significant slice of the pre-Oyster Bay GSP and paying it back down will be a nontrivial challenge.
However, like Germany during World War II, there is a Whole Big Bunch (to use a technical term) of Manticoran private investment tucked away outside the Star Empire. In many respects, one of the bigger things the Marshall plan did for Germany post-World War II was to provide a sort of a bridge loan until private German funds could reemerge from places they’d been stashed away — like Argentina, for example — and return to all of those suddenly available investment opportunities in the Federal Republic. I wouldn’t be at all surprised <he said innocently> is something like that were to occur in Manticore, too.
Nobody in the books to date, other than the post-Oyster Bay cabinet meeting I shared with you, has been agonizing over the financing of postwar reconstruction (a) because they have bigger (and more immediate) concerns (like staying alive until they get to the postwar reconstruction) and (b) because they realize the inherent strength of Manticore’s economic position depends far more on its astrographic position and possession of the Junction than on any other single factor, or probably even any other combination of factors.
They have been worrying about things like ammunition expenditures, which you have seen, and the need to conserve ammunition has been one factor (among several) in their decision against taking the war to the Solarian League. Mycroft is eating up a significant percentage of their total Mark 23 stockpile, which is one of the reasons they have been depending on Mark 16s (and Mark 16-armed units) for Lacoön and the reason Tenth Fleet has very few Mark 23-armed podnoughts. When Second Fleet was dispatched to reinforce Mike Henke, one reason it was chosen was because its wallers aren’t Mark 23-armed. Havenite MDMs, even without Apollo, are more than enough to get the job done against any opponent who doesn’t have them. And the Republic’s missile production lines were untouched by Oyster Bay, just as Bolthole was never attacked. With Beowulf’s Mark 23 and Mark 16 production coming online in a steadily strengthening stream, ammunition concerns will pretty much disappear over the next few months, as well.
When it seems to me that the economic/industrial situation is germane to the story line, I’ll talk about. When it doesn’t seem germane to me, then I won’t talk about it. I am, however, aware of the factors involved in its present state and future evolution, and if anyone in the Star Empire thought that Manticore was going to experience some sort of catastrophic economic collapse postwar, I would’ve told you about that already. That doesn’t mean Manticore won’t experience a period of what feels — particularly to the Manties in light of their collective experience over the last couple of centuries of peace — like painful economic retrenchment while it finishes rebuilding and paying off the various loans and bond issues upon which it is currently depending. Most places in the Fringe would be simply delighted if their economies were even remotely as good as Manticore’s “straitened circumstances” will be, however.
And unlike those places in the Fringe, Manticore’s difficulties will be transitory.
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