' Wrote:Also, if everyone uses credits, can Rheinland even print more money?
I believe that, yes, they could. At least produce more of their own (whether or not they literally print it I am unsure of). Here are some relevant bits of rumor and the like (emphasis mine), related to Rheinland historically doing that as well as having separate currencies:
133747:
Rheinland has seen better days. Since the end of the war, we've had one crisis after another. The Popular Revolution never fulfilled its promise. The government just keeps issuing more money in order to pay off its debts, so the inflation rate is out of control. It's running about 5 percent a week right now.
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134210: The Rheinland credits that I am paid with lose more value each day. The inflation we are experiencing here is so great that the only kind of payment that keeps is actual Commodities. If it wasn't for the fact that we get room and board, I would find other work.
134190:
I've almost got enough saved to retire. I don't know what I'm going to do or where I will go. I might go to Liberty. I don't really want to, but I always get paid in Liberty coin so the currency doesn't lose value before I can spend it.
525181: (Planet Stuttgart)
Colonised in late 94 A.S., shortly after the exploration of the Stuttgart system by the famous Rheinland explorer, Von Rohe, Stuttgart was hailed as the Jewel of Rheinland. A green, almost inconceivably fertile world, owing to the high concentration of carbon dioxide and oxygen in the atmosphere, planet Stuttgart was colonised heavily by tens of thousands of would-be farmers, attracted by the prospect of making a living on a planet that did not spend most of its time bathed in sub-zero temperatures.
It quickly became the primary food producer for the whole of Rheinland, with many plants from Earth and elsewhere in Sirius being grown with ease in the oxygen rich atmosphere. It was during the formative years that many of the huge farming clans and dynasties started, the largest of which were the Bachmeier, Erlichmann, Sterl and Weiss families, who controlled enormous plantations and farms across the planet. The farmers organised themselves into a collective known as the WVS, a powerful Farmers Rights union that lobbied New Berlin for farming subsidies successfully for centuries. The government money boosted Stuttgart's food output and generated a huge amount of wealth for the farmers, but the happy situation was not to last.
As the Eighty Years War against the Gas Miners Guild wound down towards its ignoble conclusion, the Rheinland government, realising that it was almost bankrupt, decided to cut all subsidies to planet Stuttgart almost overnight. The WVS protested massively, but was completely ignored. It later came to light that the Rheinland government had borrowed massively from Liberty during the many years of fighting against the GMG and, with the end of the war in 669 A.S., Liberty was calling in its debts. Having no money to pay them with and in an attempt to renegotiable more favourable loan conditions, the Rheinland government gave Liberty corporations, Synth Foods in particular, unrestricted access to the planet Stuttgart.
With the Rheinland currency completely devalued and unemployment skyrocketing by the day, the vast majority of the farmers on Stuttgart were virtually bankrupt along with the rest of their nation. Synth Foods moved in immediately, buying out many of the farming dynasties over the following decades, including the huge Erlichmann family, which had had a series of mysterious disasters occurring on a number of plantations in the year preceding their collapse. Most of the remaining farmers were forced to buy all of their seeds and poor quality fertilisers from Synth Foods, and sell much of their produce to the Liberty corporation at the same time. Despite this, the population continued to rise as immigrants poured in to serve as the labour force on Synth Food plantations, with the current population estimated at around 540 million as of 817 A.S.
In 770 A.S., Synth Foods began increasing the carbon dioxide level in Stuttgart's atmosphere in order to make it even easier to manufacture Synth Paste. Again, the WVS protested heavily to the government, but was duly ignored. This sparked a number of sabotage incidents at Synth Food owned factories and it lead to Synth Foods forcing the Rheinland government to replace virtually all of the original WVS board members with their lackeys in 775 A.S., destroying the farming union's voice in New Berlin. It was this final act that lead radicals from the WVS, including the former head of the Erlichmann family, to found the LWB later the same year, in the hopes of one day driving Synth Foods from Stuttgart and returning the planet to its rightful place as the Jewel of Rheinland.
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