Empire Rising: Spain

Chapter 187: Chapter 145: Cooperative Treasure Hunting

As a former colonial empire, Spain actually possessed a considerable gold reserve. However, due to its weakened national power, plus a large part of the wealth belonging to the former royal Bourbon family, when the Bourbon family fled north to France, they took a large amount of gold and other properties with them.

Currently, the gold reserves under the control of the Spanish Government are less than 200 tons. The gold reserves in Carlo’s possession are even less, totaling less than ten tons altogether.

There’s no helping it. Gold, during the era of the gold standard, wasn’t all that important to nations.

Having gold allows for currency printing, and the ratio between gold and currency could not possibly be fixed at 1:1.

In some countries with more gold reserves, the actual printed ratio of gold to currency reaches more than 1:10.

What does this mean? Holding gold worth 100 million pounds could result in the issuance of over 1 billion pounds of banknotes.

However, currency printing cannot be reckless. First, there is the concern that a large influx of currency into the market would cause currency devaluation and inflation. Secondly, there’s the worry that overly frequent gold exchanges would severely deplete domestic gold reserves, leading to a currency crisis where there’s no gold left to exchange.

To put it simply, currency issuance is also related to currency credibility. Gold reserves are a major factor that can support currency credibility and one of the most important methods as well.

Currency itself does not possess value; it acquires real value only because it is pegged to gold. Without gold, money is practically just a piece of waste paper and cannot circulate in the market.

The Royal United Bank and the Spanish National Bank, as the only two legal currency-issuing banks in Spain, have also accumulated a certain amount of gold reserves over the past few years of currency issuance.

But together, both major banks have accumulated just slightly over ten tons of gold reserves, which, although a substantial amount for the banks themselves, is just a drop in the bucket for Spain.

The Spanish Government’s gold reserves might be able to cope with this economic crisis, but who would consider gold to be too much anyway?

For every additional ton of gold in hand, one can create millions of pounds, which is more than 30 million pessetas in value.

Whether for the Spanish Government or the two official banks, the more gold reserves they have, the better.

Where should they get enough gold reserves to deal with this economic crisis?

Carlo thought of many ways, but most of them were not very reliable, at least not feasible for Spain.

For example, salvaging sunken treasures. To say the least, during Spain’s colonial period in America, several treasure-transporting ships sank in the Atlantic Ocean.

Although the wealth transported on a single ship wasn’t too much, collectively, the lost treasure from all these sunken ships might still add up to a significant amount of wealth.

However, the problem is that the locations of these shipwrecks are not perfectly fixed. Moreover, with current salvage technology, even if the locations of these sunken ships were found, it doesn’t mean they could necessarily be salvaged.

Besides, the Atlantic Ocean is vast, making it extremely challenging to locate the shipwrecks. Current technology is not suitable for salvaging shipwrecks; otherwise, more technologically advanced countries like England and France would have done so already.

Apart from salvaging shipwrecks, another relatively reliable method is prospecting for and mining gold, but this requires a long time, and essentially all the already identified gold mines are owned. Prospecting for gold in other areas also takes too long.

Carlo does know of many places with large gold mines, but the question is, how can Spain ensure that other major powers will not interfere, allowing Spain to monopolize these gold mines?

Moreover, even if Carlo identifies a region where gold mines exist, it still requires mining exploration teams to locate the mines, and extensive gold ore mining and refinement are necessary.

This lengthy process clearly cannot keep pace with the economic crisis, making it unsuitable for the current situation in Spain.

After much consideration, Carlo finally focused on the Indians. The Indian region, with the world’s second largest population, also holds a plethora of hidden treasures.

Carlo is naturally aware of the Indian Temple Treasure, which is shrouded in many rumors for future generations. There is not just one Temple Treasure in India, with the largest one possessing abundant riches, while even the smaller ones contain plenty of gold and silver treasures, enough to obtain considerable gold reserves if any are acquired.

However, the current issue is that India is under British control, and the relationship between the British and Spain is not all that amicable.

Furthermore, digging up the Temple Treasure in India needs to be done in complete secrecy. With the power Carlo currently holds, it’s difficult to fully execute the entire plan. After all, this requires sending personnel to India to dig up the treasure, keep it hidden from the entire Indian Colonial Government and the British Government, and transport the treasure from India to Spain.

Yet it would be too much of a pity to simply abandon the Temple Treasure in India.

Although the historical Temple Treasure won’t be discovered until more than 100 years later, who can say for certain that things won’t change?

After all, even the course of the Franco-Prussian War has already been altered, making it impossible for Carlo to determine whether future events will change.