Back to the end of Ming Dynasty to be a warlord

Chapter 439 No Private Money
It is an obvious reason that it is more difficult to sit in the country than to fight the country. The reason is that governing the country is more complicated than commanding a war.

In the past year or so, Yang Chao fought two battles in Yangzhou, one battle in the Yangtze River, and two battles in Taipingfu. Dodo battle.

But Yang Chao felt that stabilizing Jiangnan's economy was more of a headache than the tragic war.

At that time, the Qing army approached Nanjing, Hongguang Emperor Zhu Cilang abandoned the city, and Nanjing was in chaos. The poor people in the vicinity even broke into the palace to rob and steal.

It would be too arbitrary to think of the turmoil as just mobs taking advantage of the fire to loot. You must know that three days after the emperor abandoned the city, the price of food in Nanjing City reached ten taels a load. It also means that the economy is on the verge of collapse.

Economic collapse often means the collapse of social order.

Yang Chao returned to Nanjing and quickly stabilized the situation, but the price of grain continued to be high for a month, with an average price of five taels a load. Even if Yang Chao repelled all the enemies on all sides, the market still lasted for three The high price of two per load lasted for more than five months, making Nanjing a depression.

It wasn't until Yang Chao started to reform the tax collection system, squeezed out a large amount of hidden land from the rich, and collected this year's summer grain, that the grain price was reduced to two taels of silver.

The hard work involved is much more than fighting a dangerous war.

Although the price of grain is high, in the countryside, ordinary farmers cannot benefit at all. Because of the implementation of the one-whip law, the imperial court only collects silver, and the common people have to pay taxes. They need to sell the grain after the grain is harvested before paying the tax.

But at this time, the grain merchants and the wealthy families began to join hands to lower the price of grain, and the government forced the farmers to pay taxes. In the end, the farmers could only sell their grain at a low price. A lot of people can go bankrupt once they come and go, the land is sold to the rich, and even their children have to be slaves.

This kind of thing has happened from ancient times to the present. It is not a matter of Zhang Juzheng's one-whip law. Any law has loopholes, and rich and powerful people can always take advantage of their advantages to obtain benefits. Zhang Juzheng has two original intentions for implementing the one-whip law. One is Another purpose of increasing the court tax was to reduce the burden on the common people. Before Zhang Juzheng, the Ming Dynasty implemented a tax in kind. Those who grew grain paid grain, those who planted mulberry paid mulberry, and those who raised silkworms paid cocoon. But at that time, officials were also oppressing the common people to pay Take grain as an example, they use big buckets to collect grain privately, and the people who kicked the dendrobium to make money have to pay a lot more grain.

If Zhang Juzheng wanted to collect money, the officials would have no excuse to kick the hu, but what he didn't expect was that the government would have other worse ways to deal with the common people.

Anyway, as long as it is the law, the rich and powerful will always take advantage of it, and this will never change.

Yang Chao is naturally aware of all kinds of bad governance, so when he went to collect grain, Yang Chao didn't give profiteers and rich people a chance to collude. He set up granaries in various counties and collected grain directly. There is a choice. If the grain price offered by the grain merchants is too low, less than one or two silver, they will directly sell the grain to the government to pay taxes. If the grain merchants offer a high price, they will sell the grain to the grain merchants.

In the end, as a result of stabilizing prices, the common people finally got a stable income of one tael of silver, which is much better than the ending of tears in previous years when the harvest was bumper.

Collecting grain from the common people for one tael of silver, it is naturally impossible to sell it for one tael of silver.

Yang Chao, who held 800 million dans of grain in his hand, did not do anything at first and let the market run, but the grain merchants still sold grain at high prices, and the price of grain in Nanjing City was still as high as three or two tans. Grain was transported to Nanjing, and there was an unlimited supply of two taels of silver per load, which suppressed the attempts of grain merchants, and the price of grain returned to two taels of silver per load.

Yang Chao didn't go too far, and left them a tael of profit margin, which was regarded as the management fee for them to harvest the grain from the farmland and distribute it to various markets.

Compared with the price of ten taels or five taels in the past, two taels of silver is also an acceptable price. Although the pressure of life in the city is still greater than in the past, the farmers' income is higher than in previous years. If the farmers have no income, the enthusiasm for production will naturally not be high. Grain production cannot be raised.

As for the fact that the grain merchants didn't make huge profits, and the powerful clans failed to annex the land, there was nothing they could do about it. Yang Chao had to make them accept his own rules.

Stabilizing food prices stabilized the basic economic order, so Yang Chao set his sights on another field.

Private money!

Many of the large and small banks, banks, and pawnshops in the Ming Dynasty were involved in the field of making private money, and their main business was.

Emperors like Zhu Yuanzhang and Zhu Di who dared to cast private money in the early Ming Dynasty were absolutely intolerable, and they would simply behead their heads.

However, the profit of private money is too rich, and it is still unbearable. However, the money made by the imperial court in the early Ming Dynasty was of good quality and sufficient weight, and private money was not too rampant.

After the mid-Ming Dynasty, the economy became more prosperous, and the required currency circulation increased greatly. There was a serious shortage of money in the market, and as a result, the business of minting private money increased.

The Ming Dynasty tried to ban it, but the court itself wanted to cast a large amount of money, but there was not enough copper, and the government was corrupt. The quality of the money made by the court was not as good as private money. There was resistance from the common people to make money, and there was a lot of trouble, which made Wei Zhongxian seize the opportunity to severely attack the officials of the Donglin Party who made money.

After that, the imperial court ignored the minting of private money. Anyway, the imperial court was unable to mint money, and there was not enough money in the market. In the end, the right to mint coins was ceded to private banks and silver shops.

The imperial court used the copper that was confiscated, and the craftsmen who did not need wages cast money that was not as good as private ones. The right to mint coins can only be handed over to the people.

But these private money miners are not good things. They use the minted money to disrupt the currency market. The price of copper coins fluctuates greatly compared to silver. , They take advantage of their strong capital to extract precious metals from them.

The soaring price of food some time ago has something to do with the chaotic financial order.

To be honest, these people won the right to mint coins because of market demand, and the imperial court could not provide enough currency. If it was just this, Yang Chao would not want to affect their interests and let them continue to mint coins.

However, it is not acceptable for Yang Chao to use the power of coinage to search for silver and disrupt the financial market.

This must be resolutely combated, and the right to mint coins should be taken back to the imperial court, or the Metropolitan Governor's Mansion, under the control of Yang Chao.

But this group of minting private money is definitely not so easy to deal with. First of all, there is a huge force behind them.

Even if Yang Chao was beaten to death, he did not believe that the poor money-making made by civil officials in Donglin back then could make the people of Nanjing take to the streets to fight.

The people of Ming Dynasty are so aggressive?Behind this must be the same as the boycott of Wanli's collection of mining taxes back then, someone instigated it.

As for who the instigator is, Yang Chao is well aware that anyone who dares to make private money is a powerful and deeply rooted force. In the Ming Dynasty, there are only two kinds of such forces, one is the big wealthy family that has been passed down for hundreds of years The other is the nobles who live with the country, and ordinary businessmen cannot do this kind of business.

So Yang Chao had no choice but to attack the nobles and nobles again.

As for the nobles, there is nothing to worry about. The imperial court has become like this. They rely on the imperial court to obtain power, and they are not much different from ordinary wealthy families. Therefore, it is actually the wealthy clan groups that are attacked.

In other words, the attack was wrong, Yang Chao just wanted to take back the right to mint coins, anyway, they never had such power legally, it was just that the court ignored their actions.

So after the grain price stabilized, Yang Chao felt that the time had come, and immediately issued a decree, strictly prohibiting the casting of private money, and those who violated the decree will be punished.

The laws of the Ming Dynasty have not changed. How Zhu Yuanzhang treated private money casting is still the same stripes now, but no one enforces it. Now Yang Chao has moved out to let the government strictly enforce it. There is reason and evidence, and he is not afraid that the rich will not obey.

As for the rebound of the powerful clan, don't be afraid of force for the time being. They have just been hit once. I believe that these powerful clans dare not stand up and let Yang Chao cut them down. Their most powerful weapon is not the group of servants, but the financial power in their hands.

The reason why private money became popular on a large scale was that the Ming Dynasty lost the ability to mint money. After the apocalypse, Emperor Chongzhen set up a money minting bureau in Linqing.

Now Yang Chao prohibits those banks from pawnshops from minting private money, but Zhu Yuanzhang can’t ban it by using peeling to fill grass. , even if they want to mint money, they have to weigh the cost issue, and if the money minted is not worth the cost, it is naturally forbidden.

By the time they slowly collected enough tin and planned to mint it again, Yang Chao had already removed the copper coins from the Ming currency system.

This is Yang Chao's final plan, to use paper money against copper coins, and kick copper coins out of the Ming currency system in one fell swoop.

Let the Ming currency system be further upgraded to the silver standard stage, and it is still an era behind the West.

You must know that the West is a gold and silver bistandard system. The stability of gold and silver is obviously much stronger than that of copper. Using silver as currency is obviously more stable than making money.

After the ban was issued, Yang Chao sent many spies in the army to report the market conditions in various places at all times.

Yang Chao originally thought that the banks would continue to mint money secretly regardless of everything, but it was more concealed, but what Yang Chao didn't expect was that these banks not only stopped minting private money, but began to return copper coins on a large scale, plus the prohibition of private money , Soon the financial order in the market became chaotic.

In the south of the Yangtze River, money was expensive and silver was cheap at that time, and the price of one tael of silver from nine hundred to one thousand taels unexpectedly increased to four to five hundred taels.

(End of this chapter)