"Professor, everything is progressing smoothly. Yang has successfully entered the research center and has been directly appointed as a project leader, a mid-level position within the research center. Do we need to give him instructions to find a way to get in touch with the material research and development department as soon as possible!" Inside the presidential office of the Goldman Sachs Group, Professor Parkinson, who had taken over the presidency for four years, like Dr. Cooper before him, was listening to his subordinate's work report.
The most important among these was the situation of Yang, the super spy meticulously arranged by the company.
Over these past four years, Professor Parkinson's life had been both good and bad.
To say his life was good was because after leading the six-trillion-dollar bailout plan and the US United Super Vacuum Tube Railway Company plan, Goldman Sachs had reaped immense profits. Not only had the company's net assets increased by about 1 trillion US dollars, but shareholders had also made fortunes. Everyone at Goldman Sachs was completely convinced of Professor Parkinson's capabilities. Professor Parkinson could confidently state that he had completely taken control of the entire Goldman Sachs Group and had thoroughly eliminated all traces left by his predecessor within the group. This was indeed a great thing!
The bad aspect was that Professor Parkinson had also begun to realize that the United States itself was becoming increasingly worse.
The first issue was the side effect of the 6-trillion-dollar bailout plan, which was that the dollar's hegemony was no longer as stable as before.
With the excessive issuance of the dollar, its purchasing power began to decline. Since the dollar was simultaneously tied to other countries' economies, this led to the deterioration of other countries' economies as well.
In the past, when the dollar was still called "beauty gold," because the dollar was tied to gold, a certain amount of dollars could be exchanged for a certain amount of gold. At that time, the dollar itself still had value.
But now, the dollar had been decoupled from gold, and the dollar no longer had any tangible marker of value. Don't even talk about the dollar being tied to oil; the dollar's connection to oil is actually a scam.
Therefore, many countries could only purchase oil using dollars, but the price of oil was far from as stable as gold. Gold price fluctuations, unless a world war occurred, would typically be at most around 30% per year.
However, the price of oil could fluctuate several times a year. And even if the price of oil rose, your dollar's purchasing power did not increase.
To put it bluntly, the so-called link between the dollar and oil is merely a tool to plunder the wealth of other countries. As long as you keep printing dollars, you can purchase a large amount of means of production from other countries.
In the past, the dollar at least used various complex fiscal policies and measures to inform everyone that the dollar was stable and that the shameless act of directly printing money did not occur.
But after the 6-trillion-dollar plan was launched, it became a blatant act of shamelessness. This is because the additional 6 trillion dollars ultimately flowed into various countries around the world, madly purchasing resources, human services, and even dignity from those countries.
The value generated by the hard work of billions of people in these countries was thus taken away by these sheets of paper, directly printed.
And each country's production capacity is limited. When Americans used vast amounts of US dollars to buy these resources, the resources available to their own nation would inevitably decrease, and domestic prices would inevitably rise. Although the income of the people in their own countries appeared to increase, their purchasing power actually decreased. Ultimately, most countries experienced varying degrees of negative economic impacts, with many even facing severe fiscal deficits, forcing them to rely on issuing more national debt to maintain operations.
In conclusion, the Americans profited immensely from this move, but they overdrafted their own credibility and trust. In the long run, the entire hegemony was bound to head towards collapse.
Professor Parkinson actually knew this long ago; he was not foolish. He was a top economist, and Dr. Cooper had thoroughly analyzed all of this in their conversations. Of course, he knew the consequences that the 6 trillion dollars would trigger.
But there was nothing that could be done. One couldn't let the Wall Street capitalists go to the rooftop, could they?
Moreover, Professor Parkinson believed that all of this was not irretrievable. All of this could be compensated for by their own high-end industrial products. This was their greatest hegemony besides the dollar, namely technological hegemony. This hegemony was even more important than oil hegemony.
As the saying goes, for every action, there is a reaction. Since the Americans were using printed dollars to purchase resources from the world, they must also have something that would make other countries willing to spend these printed dollars to buy back. Maintaining the balance of imports and exports would thus allow the dollar's hegemony to continue.
And that "something" is high technology.
Up until 2016, the United States' high-tech hegemony had been implemented very successfully.
Setting aside other minor high-tech aspects, in the 1990s, the greatest technological hegemony was computer hegemony. The United States almost monopolized the upper structure of the entire computer industry, monopolizing computer chips, computer systems, and other crucial computer products. These brought in trillions of dollars in exports annually, effectively ensuring the value of the dollar.
After the 21st century, mobile phone high-tech was added. After 2010, it was the smartphone hegemony.
And after 2020, Professor Parkinson had already planned for the ultra-high-speed vacuum magnetic levitation train technology.
In addition to these, there were leading advantages in materials, medicine, biology, and other fields of high technology. These were the fundamental factors that maintained the value of the dollar. As long as this set of high-tech hegemony remained, the United States would forever be the United States.
Precisely because he understood this, Professor Parkinson firmly believed that even with the over-issuance of 6 trillion dollars, it could be gradually repaid in the future, as long as their high technology remained.
However, the problem was that Professor Parkinson suddenly discovered that the hegemony in high technology was suddenly starting to waver, and the core of all this was actually a company from China.
Starting with memory chips, Jiangnan Group began to challenge US high-tech companies. Now, their memory chips have completely occupied almost all of the mid-to-high-end market. You can't even ban them, because they don't sell dollars in the United States at all. Your US manufacturers have to beg in China for quotas, who cares if they are cheaper and have larger capacities!
If it were just memory chips, it would be a drop in the bucket.
But with the advent of quint-based computer chips, quint-based systems, and terminal platforms, it was no longer a drop in the bucket; it was nine-tenths of the cow's fur.
Ninety percent of the cow's fur had been stripped away. Next, it would be time to bleed the cow and butcher the beef.
As expected, China's vacuum ultra-high-speed railway had already been opened. Although the stock of US United Super Vacuum Tube Railway Company had rebounded in the stock market, the blow to Professor Parkinson was extremely severe. He had clearly realized that it was imperative to bite down hard on Jiangnan Group, otherwise, it would be too late to regret it.
Therefore, Professor Parkinson began to study the various data of Jiangnan Group very seriously. Similar to his predecessor, Dr. Cooper, Professor Parkinson finally concluded that to deal with Jiangnan Group, espionage was still the way to go.
Yes, this was also similar to his predecessor, Dr. Cooper. However, Professor Parkinson believed that his methods were much more sophisticated than Dr. Cooper's.
This was because Dr. Cooper had used a commercial spy like Hao Jianguo. Although he held a very high position as the head of Jiangnan Group's US branch, in order to promote Hao Jianguo, Goldman Sachs had to use its own resources to help Jiangnan Group's American branch develop domestically, effectively aiding the enemy.
However, the spy actually obtained very little. After much effort, two things were brought back: Android and the ultra-high-speed vacuum magnetic levitation railway.
The former had clearly been ambushed by Jiangnan Group; Android no longer existed, and most of it was Google's terminals.
As for the ultra-high-speed vacuum magnetic levitation railway, although there was no evidence yet that they had been tricked, Professor Parkinson estimated that with Huang He's character, there was no reason for him not to leave them with a fallback. This project was also likely to be a trap.
So, Dr. Cooper was really incompetent. In the end, it was all a trap set by the enemy.
But their situation was different. They were not deploying commercial spies, but technical spies, and the most direct technical spies, directly embedded in the opponent's heart.
Professor Parkinson had indeed studied Jiangnan Group very seriously, and he had come to a conclusion: all of Jiangnan Group's current technological advancements originated from a miraculous material they called Black Gold.
This was a very powerful material that could be used in chips to exponentially increase their computing power. It could also be used in other electronic devices to enhance their functionality.
Furthermore, it could be used in magnetic levitation materials, aerospace materials, and various other high-tech projects, making it a truly all-purpose material.
Secretly, many American experts even referred to this material as "God Alloy," implying that it was a metal that only God could have created.
But the problem was that, to this day, the United States had not figured out what Black Gold actually was, what its properties were, let alone how to manufacture it.
Even the discovery of Black Gold took the United States a full five to six years of intelligence gathering. And even now, they only knew that Black Gold was likely closely related to carbon elements, but the specifics remained unclear. This was because no physical samples of Black Gold had ever been released. All they could collect at present were some processed forms of Black Gold that had lost their original appearance.
Therefore, if they could obtain detailed information about Black Gold, or even how to manufacture it, then Jiangnan Group's advantage would cease to exist, and America's technological hegemony would be as stable as ever.
And with the high-tech of Black Gold obtained, Goldman Sachs Group would become the next super conglomerate!
Just thinking about it made him a little excited!