Having spent some time sojourning away from these forums, upon my return I decided to ease back into things with a brief check-in on Butterfly. I am much gratified to find that in the preceding two months only one update has been produced, in accordance with that most majestic of timelines.
I shall reply to the update and then catch up on the following discussion, which by now despite being not two pages off from the update I am certain has moved in to such unrelated topics as US Navy procuration policies, nuclear weapons, and/or South Indian architecture. With any luck, I'll even have called at least one of the three.
Imperial Conferences spawned committees, councils and bureaus in much the same way the Stuarts spawned illegitimate children; frequently, vigorously and with precious little thought as to the consequences.
One will be hard-pressed to find a more suitable line to welcome one back to AARland than this.
While the Australian government had grandly declared they wished to build the 'whole engine', as opposed to assembling kits of imported parts, the reality was proving far more challenging than they had imagined.
I await the day when we shall all be surprised as a government finally finds, for the first time in human history, that reality proves exactly as challenging as expected. I do not await this day with much optimism, however.
It was quietly being discussed if allowing a small number of imported parts would be an acceptable compromise of Australia's grand aero-engineering industrialisation plans.
My understanding from modern politics is that no compromise is acceptable. I hope the age under discussion is one more enlightened in such matters. Again, I hold out precious little optimism, however.
while a great deal of British capital was being invested in Australia, Canada and the wider Empire (formal and informal) it was going to the 'wrong' schemes. That is to say projects that would make the best returns for the investors and not those schemes that accorded with the plans of the various governments.
The day that the government and the investors agree on the 'right' schemes is a day of fear and trembling, for that is the day when the investors have bought out the govern...oh. Oh no. Oh dear...
As an example gold mining was a popular choice for the Empire focused investor, very large scale investment was ongoing throughout the 1930s in new and expanded mines in Western Australia, Northern Ontario, the Canadian North West Territories and much of East Africa. With so much of the world economy remaining on the gold standard, and with the 'Gold Fix' conveniently priced in Sterling in London, these investments were proving far lucrative than expected, even after the costs of the additional infrastructure required to access the new mines. The delight amongst the investors at this was almost perfectly mirrored by the frustrations of the Dominion governments, who had wished to move their economies away from resource extraction and into more industrial endeavours.
A clever investor might think to set up an industrial endeavor which relies on the resources so extracted, in parallel with such a resource extraction operation, and profit from both ends of the system so constructed. Unfortunately for said investor, governments apparently tend to frown on this sort of thing, using words like "monopoly" and "antitrust". Whether this is either here or there, I leave as an exercise for the writAAR.
However those efforts were fairly narrowly focused on the British domestic market, had more than half an eye on minimising 'disruption' to the existing systems and, far more seriously, were not actually working.
It's always that last bit that keeps getting you in the arse end, that.
The stick' (making other investment opportunities less attractive through tax or regulations) was discarded due to concerns it would have undesirable side effects elsewhere,
It is at this point that I know for certain we have diverged once again from actual history, as real historical governments have never shown such acute self-awareness in all of history to date.
What should also be noted that the Bank of England directors would feel they 'owed' the clearing banks something for their failure to maintain the status quo and that this marker would be called in sooner than anyone had expected with quite unexpected consequences.
A plot hook, to be recalled sometime in mid-2030.
Some people would have to tempt fate and say industrial finance seemed very interesting and that it would not scare anyone off. Let us see if they are still so confident of those opinions now.
If anything, I would complain only that I wish to see the knock-on effects of such things rather more promptly. I would, but as this is Butterfly and any form of promptness would be an insult to the art, I shan't. Things are best this way.
The Macmillan Gap was indeed a thing, you can find a number of explanations ranging from "Evil bankers oligarchy" through to "It's Lloyd Georges fault". Naturally I prefer that explanation, which is obviously correct.
The reasoning is thus - the main source of small/mid sized industrial investments from the Industrial revolution through to just before WW1 were mad aristocrats, the idle rich and people who had already made a fortune from industrial endeavours. The huge hike in Death Duties Lloyd George introduced, followed by WW1 and lots of lords and heirs dying off, encouraged all those people to setup trusts and other such tax-dodges, none of which could do such industrial investments as they were required by tax law to invest in sensible things (if they were to pretend to be a trust not a tax dodge). Frankly Lloyd George should have had the testicular fortitude to just tax the rich properly and not do it in such a half arsed, easily dodged and distortional way. But I digress.
While I can't speak for the rest of the world, if you said such things in the USA you'd likely manage to get both sides of the political spectrum equally enraged at yourself, an impressive act of acumen for which I'd wholeheartedly commend you.
Keeping up that classic Pippian tradition of acronymese, I see.
