“What?”
“Cloth,” Magda explained, “made with wool and cotton, and woven in the north of England. The return trip will bring batiks and spices and some other things we can sell on for profit.”
“Some of the phone stuff,” Sharon interjected, “we got right here in Venice. All of the insulators are being made in Murano, just across the lagoon. They’re doing them to quality standards to train apprentices, they said, rather than working to the tolerances that the people at Prague said would do.” She smiled. “I sent a wireless message to Tanner and Ellie telling them about the tolerances we’d gotten on the samples, and they sent back asking how we’d mechanized so quickly.”
Stoner nodded. He’d been surprised himself a few times by that sort of thing, since he’d assumed that craftsmen around Thuringia from whom he’d ordered glasswork for the dye factory could do quality or volume but not both, and been pleasantly surprised. Of course, if you watched how fast a competent journeyman could work and then sat down and did the math, it wasn’t so surprising. And if they had to turn out a big batch of something quickly, they reorganized the workshop to throw man-hours at the project until it was done.
“Tell him about the aqua vitae, Sharon,” Magda said.
“Oh, yeah, that’s a good one. There’s a fair bit of wine gets rejected when it’s imported here, and some of the local product is pretty poor too. There are a fair few good old-fashioned ‘shiners as well. When I drew a Liebig condenser for them, there were a few guys slapping foreheads, and a couple of the glassware shops did a roaring trade in the things for a couple of weeks. They use copper pipes and leather fittings, but they work. Now they’re making alcohol a lot cheaper and purer than anywhere else, and with about eleventy-seven businesses back in the USE fighting over the supplies of good alcohol there’s a good market. We did middleman trade on that for a while, and got a cut out of nearly a whole year’s production even before the factories we took shares in turned a profit. Anyway, we got paper for most of those payments and cash for some of them, which was good, since we fed that back into the mill on the Rialto. Some of the alcohol factories have managed to do mail-order deals back to the USE and cut out the middlewomen, but that’s okay, we’ll make it up elsewhere. For now we’ve got cash flow.”
“And what are we doing with that cash flow?”
“Servicing the term loans,” said Magda promptly, with the air of a woman who regarded memoranda and ledgers as management tools for lesser minds. “With the term loans we underwrote the stock issues. The ghetto already has SEC rules and—”
“What?” Stoner began to feel he was really, really overusing that word.
“Ah,” said Benjamin, sitting forward in his chair. “Perhaps I can explain this one best. There was a brief description of your Securities and Exchange Commission and your stock exchanges in several of the management and business textbooks in Grantville, and Admiral Simpson was kind enough to furnish some excellent seminars in the matter. We already had most of the things they variously described, and combining them into more organized and consistent markets impressed many of us as a good idea, if it could be made practical. So we circulated the ideas we found most helpful.”
“How?” asked Stoner, pleased at a chance to vary his vocabulary a little, “and who to?”
“Well, first we passed it—ah, I should mention that Don Francisco Nasi wrote a most incisive monograph on the matter, which we had printed. It was circulated here in Venice first, since the Rialto is such an important market among those to which we had easy access in these troubled times. It also went to Genoa, and by some less direct routes, I hear, to Antwerp and Amsterdam and Paris. It has also gone to the City and some other places further east. Everywhere I have mentioned has done some of the things in Don Francisco’s monograph and now a few of them are doing more. On some subjects, Don Francisco can be very . . . persuasive, when he is minded to.”