50s: Starting with a storage ring

Chapter 685 Zheng Jiafa's Attack
Before the meeting began, agents conducted a thorough security check of the entire Plaza Hotel and meeting rooms to ensure there were no listening devices or explosives.

After Sun Zhiwei and the others finished their inspection, before the finance minister and bank presidents entered, they secretly placed a set of eavesdropping equipment into the chandelier on the ceiling of the conference room.

As the recording equipment ran, Sun Zhiwei recorded the entire process of negotiating and signing agreements in the meeting room without missing a single word.

The Plaza Accord contains many clauses, many of which were actually agreed upon during previous communications.

This formal meeting was merely a matter of finalizing all matters and signing documents.

Sun Zhiwei's job was relatively easy because no one would discover the eavesdropping devices he had placed, so he didn't need to take any precautions; he could simply record the conversation with the recorder on.

The meeting lasted all day, and although their subsequent public announcement was very simple, the content of the agreement was quite complicated.

Fortunately, all of this was recorded, so no further written description is needed.

Two days later, the complete recording of the meeting was placed on the desk of the leaders in Beijing.

According to the leaders, this one-way transparency is really encouraging.

In the past, when faced with such internal Western meetings, they could only judge how to respond based on limited information obtained from external news reports.

Often, we are misled by the enemy's tricks, leading to incorrect judgments.

Now, with advance warnings and complete meeting recordings, all of the enemy's movements are under our watchful eyes.

Those deliberate attempts to mislead and the fabricated news reports, like scenes from a play, seem so ridiculous to us.

Following the Plaza Conference, the five participating countries took action simultaneously.

The US dollar began to depreciate rapidly in the market, while the Japanese yen began to appreciate. The intervention of the five countries also triggered market panic and ushered in a sell-off frenzy.

Everything is unfolding exactly as Sun Zhiwei described in his report a week ago.

Because of his advance report, the domestic foreign exchange reserves were successfully converted, and instead of suffering a loss, they made a fortune from this exchange rate change.

Of course, because of their position as a nation, they cannot take risks, and the benefits they gain are ultimately limited.

Cathay Bank, however, was completely different. With Sun Zhiwei's early warning and the support of major shareholder Sun Zhiwei, the bank's president, Zheng Jiafa, made a grand plan.

He used all of the bank's reserves and borrowed a large amount of yen from the four major banks, which were small in scale, with the gold reserves as collateral, and agreed to repay the loans in US dollars.

With this inflow and outflow, Cathay Bank made several times its profit within a few months due to the depreciation of the US dollar and the appreciation of the Japanese yen.

As everyone knows, the smaller the amount, the easier it is to increase its value; the larger the amount, the smaller the profit margin.

Doubling $1 might only take a day.

To double $1 million, it would take at least months.

Many wealthy people are no longer pursuing how much money they can make, but rather how to preserve the value of their existing assets.

For them, even if they don't make money, as long as they don't lose money, the 1 million yuan in their hands is a profit.

However, the reality is that even if money is left untouched, it will still be affected by factors such as exchange rates and inflation. Without a means to preserve its value, cash will inevitably decrease over time.

Given Cathay Pacific's current asset size of tens of billions, the chances of doubling its assets in a short period of time are extremely slim.

The signing of the Plaza Accord presented a rare opportunity in recent years, which Sun Zhiwei naturally wouldn't miss. Zheng Jiafa, on the other hand, was an exceptionally decisive and capable executive; his ability to act was rare among the talented people Sun Zhiwei had encountered in this era.

Therefore, under normal circumstances, he would never interfere with Cathay Pacific's operations.

In fact, Zheng Jiafa and Sun Zhiwei were not very familiar with each other. Before Zheng Jiafa took over as president, Sun Zhiwei had only met with him two or three times.

Sun Zhiwei's most trusted person at Cathay Pacific was Zheng Jiafa's teacher, who was also the previous Cathay Pacific leader, Cheng Damin.

However, since Zheng Jiafa succeeded Cheng Damin as president, Sun Zhiwei has never hindered him in any way, but has given him full trust and authority.

This trust further encouraged Zheng Jiafa, although it was largely due to his teacher Cheng Damin, it also demonstrated Sun Zhiwei's approval of him.

In this Plaza Accord incident, the top-secret information that Sun Zhiwei provided to Zheng Jiafa in advance not only allowed the bank to avoid losses caused by exchange rate fluctuations, but also created opportunities for Zheng's operations.

During his tenure as president, Cathay Pacific has flourished under his leadership, meaning it has continued to rise.

But Cathay Bank's profit model still relies on what his mentor, Cheng Ta-min, left behind before he took over.

The foundation for this, including the deposits and remittances of overseas Chinese both domestically and internationally, as well as investments in the mainland's reform and opening-up, was laid before he took office.

After his arrival, he largely followed the old ways, and the bank grew and expanded. Although the bank kept making money, he was not the one who deserved the most credit.

He himself did not develop a new source of revenue for Cathay Pacific, which means he never proved his ability to develop new revenue streams, which is quite embarrassing.

Now that the Plaza Accord has come to pass, he sensed an opportunity and took the risk of proposing his idea to Sun Zhiwei.

He wanted to take advantage of this opportunity to risk taking a bite out of the pie held by the financial giants.

He didn't know that Sun Zhiwei's trust in him wasn't because of Cheng Damin, but because of his memories from his past life.

But this was a reason he couldn't say, so he could only pin it on Cheng Damin.

Now that Zheng Jiafa wants to prove his pioneering ability, how could Sun Zhiwei object? Naturally, he fully supports him.

For this purpose, he also specially opened private vault number 061 in the underground vault of the New York branch, which contained the gold reserves he had opened once before.

Five safes and 100 tons of gold—this was his absolute support for Zheng Jiafa, just like his support for Huang Mingyu last time.

Having earned Sun Zhiwei's absolute trust, Zheng Jiafa did not disappoint him. He profited from the Plaza Accord incident by quadrupling Cathay Bank's total assets.

Starting this year, Cathay Bank has successfully entered the ranks of the world's top multinational banks, with total assets reaching 12 figures, entering the club of assets in the hundreds of billions.

From then on, financial giants around the world were forced to accept Cathay Bank as one of their own.

Because Cathay Bank has reached a certain size, allowing it to remain detached from the international market would severely hinder its future operations in the international capital arena.

Sun Zhiwei did not interfere, but he left Zheng Jiafa with a message:

"It's better to have what you have yourself than what your parents have. There is no warmth in the world of capital. You must take advantage of this opportunity, but also beware of sweet traps."

Sun Zhiwei has never had a good impression of those capitalists. If they could all be eliminated, the number of wars in the world would be reduced by half.

(End of this chapter)