As a mage, I just want to pursue the truth

Chapter 391

The 1930s on Blue Star were turbulent.

The combination of biophotovoltaics with traditional wind, solar and hydropower technologies has caused traditional energy sources such as oil and natural gas to lose their original functions.

As the mother of modern industry, oil is naturally not just used as fuel.

There is an entire petrochemical industry surrounding oil and natural gas.

Even if oil loses its biggest use, oil-producing countries, led by the big oil producers in the Middle East, can no longer live like before, but can survive by being frugal.

In addition to the big fish farmers having a hard time, Russia, which is heavily dependent on natural gas and oil, is also having a hard time. The country's high-tech industries have not yet been developed, and its original economic pillar has been broken.

Not only has the economic pillar been cut off, but the plan to strangle Europe through energy has also been ruined.

It is a double loss of economy and strategy.

Renewable energy has achieved a penetration rate of over 90 percent, while only a few traditional fuel power stations are preserved for strategic purposes.

In case of problems with wind, solar and hydropower, the thermal power station can also be restarted.

But at least from the demand side, a large part of the demand for oil has inexplicably disappeared.

But for energy-dependent countries, things are far from simple.

The birth of the virtual world has led to a shrinkage in the demand side of the entire manufacturing industry.

A very simple example is that when there was no virtual world, people initially replaced their mobile phones every year, and later changed to replacing them every three years.

After the birth of the virtual world, people no longer change their mobile phones, and a mobile phone can be used for more than ten years.

Demand has shrunk inexplicably.

For countries like America that rely on the financial industry, they can rebuild a financial system through the virtual world.

Making huge profits in this financial system.

Previously, the material was 1, but America can turn the capital into 100.
Now that we have the virtual world, after ideas are guided by external media and changed by one's own experience, there is no difference between the material world and the virtual world.

There is also no difference between assets in the physical world and assets in the virtual world.

Then the total of virtuality plus material is 1+infinity. America plays the financial game to no limit.

Thanks to this, America's capital market is even more prosperous than it was ten years ago.

But for Russia and the big dog owners, they can't play it.

Not to mention that they are unable to build a financial system to allow players from all over the world to participate, they are unable to even achieve stable profits from their participation.

If in the world capital market, America is the banker and China is the institution, then the big dogs and Russia are the leeks.

America regularly exploits the tidal effect of the dollar to reap the spoils of Russia. Russia is a little better off, as it is not exploited to a large extent, but is more of a victim of a borrowed knife.

The 20s belonged to the period of Xiang Zhuang dancing with a sword, aiming at Pei Gong.

Pei Gong was almost dying at that time, and he relied on biophotovoltaics and industrial intelligence to survive. He was really lucky.

In other words, any changes at the macroeconomic level will affect every link in the entire chain.

Two seemingly unrelated things may actually be inextricably linked.

Until the end of the 30s, there were still voices within America that believed that allowing China to join the WTO more than years ago was a mistake.

After China joined the WTO, it became completely unstoppable.

In fact, China's joining the WTO was the most beneficial thing for America at that time.

Overheated investment in the early 90s led to the bursting of the real estate bubble in Qiongdao and Shenhai, and also caused the four major banks to technically go bankrupt.

After these events, RMB began to be directly tied to the US dollar in a fixed exchange rate manner. This is the fundamental reason why America is willing to accept China into the WTO system.

America exports to China: US dollars, various high-tech products and services, medical care and finance.

China exports textiles, mid- and low-end manufacturing products, etc. to America.

This formed a perfect closed loop in the early 21st century, which was perfect for America at the time.

In the new era, that is, the 1930s, America was able to use its advantages to feed itself by sucking the blood of other countries, but these resource-rich countries could not do so.

Therefore, under some inducement, a war broke out on Blue Star, sweeping across most of its area.

China also took this opportunity to completely resolve certain historical issues.

As a direct inducement, it also caused irreversible losses to the interests of countless vested interests.

The Lion City is naturally a thorn in the eyes of countless people.

What was even more fatal was that Zheng Li disbanded all of Lion City's original armed forces, and the American army also withdrew from Lion City.

At least from the traditional point of view, Lion City is fat meat. It is unlikely that anyone can eat it and catch Merlin, but this is equivalent to a means to control Merlin.

Just being able to find the life-extending potion in the Science City is enough to make back the investment.

When neighboring countries tried to attack Lion City, the price offered for life-extending drugs on the dark web had reached as high as one billion US dollars.

In this era, the US dollar remains an important part of global currency.

"Mr. Zheng, does the Lion City need our assistance?

According to our intelligence, Malaysia, Indonesia, India and Neon are all trying to take action against Lion City.

Or maybe it’s already in their plan to attack Singapore.”

Before the war against Lion City broke out, China specifically notified Zheng Li and expressed its willingness to provide auxiliary defense.

"No, I have my own way to deal with this."

Zheng Li refused decisively.

Showing off muscles is normal for mages.

Not to mention that mages were originally used to launch large-scale wars in the early days.

Malaysia was the first to take action after the war broke out.

As a result, all of Malaysia's high-tech missiles that used communication technology failed. Not only could they not hit the target, they couldn't even aim at Singapore.

All of them turned around and hit the mainland.

Then they planned to end the battle by directly landing.

Similarly, during the landing process, this group of people gradually lost consciousness and had no way to get close to Lion City.

Subsequent attempts by other countries all yielded the same result.

However, Lion City survived the war and was hardly affected.

This proves one thing to some extent, that the mage has the highest authority in global network security.

If you want to launch a missile, you need to cooperate with satellite positioning.

Any modern warfare equipment cannot be separated from communication technology.

The Master can directly interfere with your communications facilities or even take over your authority.

Small countries dare to gamble, but big countries don’t. Even Japan only came up with this idea, letting Malaysia and Indonesia test the waters.

After the test results came out, I chose to give up directly.

Because this technology is too unsolvable.

If the mage chooses to side with China, he can even defeat all other countries with the power of one country.

America didn't dare to push Merlin to China at all.

Even though America knew that Merlin would favor China in some aspects.

In addition to the war, during this chaotic period, Li Miaomiao was assassinated many times by various means.

However, thanks to Zheng Li's protective measures and the measures taken by the Chinese side, these attack methods all failed.

The logic is that some forces believe that the fundamental reason why China can enjoy so many benefits is that Li Miaomiao can influence Zheng Li's decision-making to some extent.

Zheng Li doesn't care where the production base of virtual reality equipment, the management authority of the virtual world, and the development rights of the virtual world are placed.

But with Li Miaomiao, Li Miaomiao suggested putting these in China, and Zheng Li would go along with it.

And if Li Miaomiao died, then everyone would be back to the same level.

Do they also have the opportunity to compete for these industries originally in China?

By the way, the remaining two companies that successfully bid for the virtual world development rights are not giants, but two startups with less than 20 people, one in Iceland and the other in China.

After winning the bid, these two companies were both attempted to be acquired by large manufacturers with huge amounts of money.

After the news was announced, investment institutions also flocked to the company.

The founders of Chinese enterprises felt like Fan Jin, who had passed the imperial examination, and it seemed that everything was different overnight.

Originally, he was the founder of a struggling small and micro enterprise, which was not even a small and micro enterprise, but just a studio.

It survived by operating a VR office software. As a result, it became a unicorn enterprise overnight, and these investors were willing to give it a valuation of tens of billions of dollars.

In the end, the Icelandic company was invested in by a local European investment institution, and the Chinese company was also invested and controlled by Chinese state-owned capital.

After the war, the conflict was actually resolved, or most of it was resolved.

Although America withdrew from the title of world leader through the war, it did not suffer any substantial losses.

They even relied on war and financial warfare to reap heavy losses from China.

Because he couldn't sit still in this position, the only difference was who it was given to.

China became the actual controller of Southeast Asia, although it still had two enclaves, Neon and Singapore, and did not have absolute voice.

It's painful, but in a way it's totally worth it.

The silent financial war has already begun

The plummeting of Chinese stocks in the U.S. stock market has left the market in ruins and silence.

The market value dropped by nearly 20 trillion RMB in one year.
Although accompanied by the technical bear market of Nasdaq, the trillions of valuation bubble disappeared.

However, the fact that many Chinese stocks have fallen by more than 80%, or even 98%, is still unusual.

Among the Chinese stocks listed in Hong Kong, all foreign brokerage seats are selling, and it is obvious that funds with Chinese capital are buying at the bottom.

The market trend is heading towards zero.

This is a bit like the demonization of Japan that began in 1980, the emergence of trade protectionism in the automotive industry, and the use of Japan to threaten the security of the United States, when Japan was still an ally of America.

In other words, Neon has always been an ally of America.

Then came the Plaza Accord, which forced the yen to appreciate. Then the real estate bubble continued to rise. America began to attack Japan's electronic chip industry.

At the same time, Neon opened the door to the financial market and allowed American securities firms to enter.

Later, American developed products to short the Nikkei Index and began to short the Japanese stock market.

Afterwards, the Japanese central bank raised the discount rate and the Japanese real estate bubble burst.

At first, Japanese banks concealed their losses. However, around 98, during the Asian financial crisis, the Japanese central bank was unable to conceal its huge amount of bad debts, and large-scale bankruptcies began.

After that, American Capital quietly held 30% of the financial assets.

In 2020, speeches promoting the China threat theory appeared on a large scale in academia, intelligence agencies, and far-right media in the United States.

In the following years, sporadic double-anti and three-anti policies appeared in almost all fields.

The calls for threats against China have become the noisy stream of consciousness in America. America has started a new round of trade wars and financial wars, following the same approach as it did against Japan.

After the birth of the virtual world, the real estate bubble in first-tier cities with biological communication networks was further pushed up.

In line with the government's various accounting regulatory standards, American Capital has strictly required Chinese concept stocks to disclose accounting data and has been selling off Chinese concept stocks in large quantities for two consecutive years.

There is no need to develop tools to short the Chinese stock market, because the best Chinese companies are listed in America and Hong Kong.

Economic trends, such as the support for the RMB from the trade surplus and the trillions of foreign capital that have entered China's bond market over the years, have all pushed up the RMB exchange rate.

The birth of the virtual world coincides with the decline of Chinese stocks listed in the US.

China's stock market and property market were attacked by both China and America.

America is just going with the flow.

Foreign capital has entered trillions into the short-term capital markets.

China began counter-cyclical operations before the Federal Reserve's central bank tightened its policy, and China implemented a loose stimulus policy.

The plunge in Chinese stocks was accompanied by a plunge in the Hang Seng Index.

American's hedge funds can not only sell Chinese stocks, but also sell indexes.

This wave of global valuation bubble collapse was accompanied by a sudden war, global stock markets plummeted, and both the Hong Kong stock market and the A-share market entered a bear market.

And the short sellers are just getting started.

In order to curb inflation, the Federal Reserve has tightened its monetary policy aggressively and raised interest rates several times.

The US dollar index and US Treasury yields rose sharply, the interest rate spread between long and short bonds inverted, and the interest rate gap between China and the United States disappeared.

The RMB continues to depreciate.

The central bank not only strictly controlled capital outflows, but also began to tighten and raise interest rates.

The real estate bubble in first- and second-tier cities began to burst.

The stock market continues to be bearish.

The war level is victorious.

The Europa League has completely resolved the threat from the north.

Of course, Europe also did not escape the fate of being cut off.

The world has returned to a relatively stable state.

(End of this chapter)