Yes, they were shocked by her bluntness, by her disgust for their timidity. These Irish! they were thinking; she could see that. But they were also paying very close attention to her; they were transfixed, the storm outside forgotten. Now the storm was in the room, in the form of one angry intense middle-aged woman.
Well, she had to remember; when a meeting got hot it was usually going badly. This was a calculated risk, getting their attention by lashing them a bit; now she had to calm it down. So she did that. The last time she had asked them to do this, she reminded them, they had refused her. Now, she told them, the situation was different. It was so much worse it could scarcely be believed. And as the current representative in their midst of all the future generations to come, she was going to have to insist that they act. She was (remembering what Dick had told her about letting them invent the instruments) open to their suggestions as to how best to act. Possibly the Bank for International Settlements could be brought out of its twentieth-century time capsule and used as the instrument at hand for this. But act they must. Because civilization was trembling on the brink. They were going down.
Here the pathetic fallacy of an ordinary Zurcher spring storm helped bring her point home. The wind was really howling now, the air was black though it was just before noon, the whole lake was slamming into the windows and blurring the view, then the wind clarifying it with a blast, time after time— it was almost as rainy as Galway.
The new Chinese minister of finance, who served as the head of their central bank and was also at the same time a member of the standing committee, and thus one of the seven most powerful people in China, stood up to speak. A woman who had learned her English at Oxford, it sounded like, and she had a cheerful relaxed manner, as if they were discussing history, which Mary supposed they were. She pointed out that Mary had not visited China in her tour of the central banks, nor had she herself been finance minister at that time, so she had not been part of the earlier unenthusiastic response Mary had just described. In fact, in China the national banks were always trying to throw their weight around as vigorously as they could to help China’s economy, and they would be happy to join any international effort that they felt could help in a way that was good for China and the world. Indeed, it sounded to her as if what Mary was asking for was precisely the kind of thing that the Chinese government did all the time.
True enough to be a discussion point, Mary replied. But no matter which national or surpranational (with a nod to the European Union’s central bank head, and the BIS head) model they referenced or preferred, now she urged them to consider again something new and fully international: a carbon coin, a digital currency backed by a consortium of all the big central banks, with open access for more central banks to join; these coins to be backed by long-term bonds created by the consortium, and shored up against financial attacks by speculators who were sure to attack it. Defended by all the central banks working together, they would be able to repulse successfully any entities that tried to hamstring their new system. Indeed, if the central banks blockchained not just the new carbon coins but all the fiat money that existed, they could probably squeeze parasitic speculators right out of existence. The best defense being a good offense.
The crucial banks, Mary thought privately, were the US, the ECB, and China. Germany and the UK were also important, also Switzerland itself. The more the merrier, of course, as always; but the big three were crucial. Even if it were just those three, they could probably go it alone; although if they were in, Mary was sure others would join.
So, right now, although the new Chinese finance minister thought she was being positive by cheerfully comparing the proposal to ordinary Chinese practice, this wasn’t actually helping much with the others; they were looking skeptical that becoming more like China was really the answer for this moment. China was debt-laden, opaque, oligarchic, authoritarian. Even granted the modifying Chinese characteristics always referenced, they were avowedly socialist, even Marxist. What that really meant no one knew, not even the Chinese, but their financial practices were constantly offending ordinary Western norms and sensibilities, so it hadn’t been a very diplomatic move on the part of the Chinese finance minister to suggest to them that by necessity they were now having to become more Chinese. But looking at her, Mary didn’t think that this new finance minister was really very regretful about that. Her look was amused, but in the way a hawk might be amused, something hard to imagine. She had a fierce edge.
On the other hand, all central banks were undemocratic technocracies, not that dissimilar to China’s top-down system. They were run by financial elites who did what they felt was best without consulting even their own legislatures, much less the citizens of their countries. As institutions they were in fact specifically designed to function outside any legislative or democratic whims, the better to keep the financial ship of the world steadily sailing on into the great west of universal prosperity— for the elites first, and everyone else if they could be accommodated without endangering the elites on the first-class deck. So an invitation to become more undemocratic, if couched diplomatically enough, would not be entirely unwelcome to this crowd. It would be a matter of how one phrased it.
Phrasing was also important when showing the stick. First the
