When strengthening operations in Africa, regardless of all other trivial considerations, the most fundamental core is resources.
Simon happened to discuss this problem with Janet during the day.
In this world, it seems that many countries are very wealthy and many people are living a good life, but in fact, this is just an appearance.
Resources are never enough.
No matter how many arrangements the Westeros family has made in various aspects such as intelligence or military affairs, the foundation that supports it all is money, and what money represents is actually resources.
Simon is very clear about the direction of the U.S. economy in the next twenty years. The real industry will continue to be hollowed out, and the tertiary industry headed by finance will become more and more powerful. However, all this seems to be prosperous, but in fact, it is constantly abandoning a country that relies on it. The foundation of survival.
Food, clothing, housing and transportation are the most basic needs of human society.
If a country abandons these most basic people's livelihood industries and continues to add various castle-like tertiary industries, then once drastic changes occur, the results will be catastrophic.
Just like the United States, which seems to be a big agricultural country, it seems that the most basic food crisis will never happen. However, when the Soviet Union was used as a reference, when the Soviet Union disintegrated, the entire national production system collapsed. As the granary of Eastern Europe, Ukraine’s annual grain output directly From more than 50 million tons before the disintegration to 11 million tons in 1991, it plummeted by 80%, so much so that Ukraine had to ask for help from the international community to avoid famine.
The former Soviet Union did not make major industrial upgrades. Until its disintegration, it still maintained a very large proportion of industry and agriculture. However, in such an economy, when drastic changes occur, the food production system will collapse. How can the United States be an exception
The problem is easy to understand.
For the United States, when the industrial structure continues to upgrade, industries such as chemical fertilizers and agricultural machinery, which are important auxiliaries to agriculture, are abandoned due to strong pollution, low profits and other reasons, and they migrate outwards. The result is that once it falls into a serious crisis, the United States will be very vulnerable in the short term. It is difficult to provide sufficient means of production to ensure the sustainability of agricultural production.
The results are predictable.
This is not unfounded or alarmist.
Because it has happened.
During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the United States, a rapidly rising super industrial power, experienced a serious economic crisis and its industrial and agricultural production almost collapsed. Due to widespread famine caused by food shortage, more than 7 million people died abnormally in just four years from 1929 to 1933.
The changes in the economic structure of the United States cannot be stopped, and Simon does not intend to stop it.
In fact, globally, due to the profit-seeking nature of capital, in many countries, when the government regulatory system is weak or ineffective, this trend cannot be stopped.
What Simon has to do is to rely on the shell of the United States and use its huge wealth to continue to seize more resources around the world. At the same time, based on these land, forests, water sources, mineral deposits and other resources, create a sustainable world. A global physical industry chain controlled absolutely by the Stroll system.
The core of this industrial chain is 'food, clothing, housing and transportation'.
It's still the same truth. In this world, when modern civilization is no longer as easy to kill and seize a person's life as it was in the age of royal power, then the next best thing is to settle for the second best. The so-called power, in its simplest form, means controlling a person's job.
I can make you live without food and clothing with just one sentence. If you don't want to starve to death, you must listen to me. This is power.
By analogy, if you control everyone's jobs, you control the world.
This is exactly what Simon is after.
Therefore, if Simon can create a physical industry chain related to the "food, clothing, housing and transportation" of the entire world, then he will almost have the ability to control the entire world.
Of course, this is a civilized world, everyone is civilized, and reality will not appear so simple and crude. However, if you peel off the veneer of civilization, many things remain unchanged.
All in all, for the Westeros system, compared to the industrial upgrading pursued by countries around the world, what Simon has to do next is to artificially continue to 'industrial downgrade' the Westeros system.
In the current Westeros system, the two companies with the highest market value, whether Daenerys or Ygritte, obviously belong to the tertiary industry. The disadvantage of related fields is that for ordinary people, if they don't have movies to watch or can't surf the Internet, they can still live well.
That is to say, neither Daenerys nor Ygritte are absolutely necessary for this world.
The specific approach that Simon will implement is to continue to reduce its holdings in non-essential industries and continue to increase its holdings in essential industries in the next many years.
From a commercial perspective alone, this is very unwise.
Traditional necessary industries often mean fierce competition and meager profits. On the contrary, the tertiary industry usually represents low investment and high returns. This is also the fundamental reason why many countries continue to pursue industrial upgrading in the process of economic development, and even in order to pursue With high returns, the authorities will take the initiative to promote this kind of industrial upgrading.
However, with Simon, he no longer needs to make too much profit too quickly, because with the current size of the Westeros system, no matter how slow the growth rate is, the annual increment will still be very huge.
The economic size of the entire Westeros system is already equivalent to that of a group of countries at the forefront of the world. Simon is also continuing to promote the Westeros system as a country. In this case, the foundation of this 'country' must be solid. , rather than the Internet, film and television entertainment, which are non-essential industries that people in this world can live well without.
Then again, Simon only has a general direction for the 'industrial downgrade' strategy of the Westeros system, and does not have a too specific implementation plan.
We can only take one step at a time.
Because there were no specific examples to refer to, Simon could only cross the river by feeling the stones. Of course, this kind of crossing the river by feeling the stones will be carried out by countless top elite teams in the entire Westeros system, and it will certainly not be wading indiscriminately without any rules.
Moreover, Simon also has his own advantage, which is his super fault tolerance rate.
Even if the plan fails and Simon's personal net worth shrinks to one-tenth of what it is now, he is still the richest man in the world. What's more, the probability of this happening is extremely low. Just like the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis created by Wall Street was ultimately borne by the U.S. government and the entire world, the current Westeros system can also pass on the losses as long as Simon wants to , passed on to the United States, or the whole world.
…
After the housewarming party on November 21st, everything continued.
Even though the high-altitude helipad on Westeros Towers has begun to open, there is still almost no news in the media about the Westeros family quietly moving into Westeros Towers.
However, many things have begun to change.
On November 23, the Monday of the week of Thanksgiving, Simon discussed some of the ideas that came up over the weekend with James Raybould and other related core senior executives of the Westeros system, and began to formulate some staged detailed implementations. plan.
The most important point is to speed up the reduction of the stocks of some core companies such as Daenerys and Igrit.
Just like Daemon's classmates back then, they cashed out the seemingly huge amounts of stocks in their hands but were actually just on paper, and then converted them into diversified investments that were easier to cash out. The difference is that the scale of relevant stocks held by Simon is too large. In addition, Simon is not short of money, but what he lacks is suitable investment opportunities.
After discussion, everyone initially formulated a replacement plan.
Use the core company stocks of the Westeros system controlled by Simon to exchange the stocks of various other outstanding companies around the world, as long as people are willing to exchange. The biggest advantage of doing this is that it saves the step of cashing out first and then buying. These two seemingly simple steps often mean market turmoil, especially for the core corporate stocks in Simon's hands. Every time he reduces his holdings, it will have an inhibitory effect on the rise in stock prices.
Simon occasionally uses the method of reducing holdings to suppress excessive rises in stock prices, but on the other hand, it is impossible to directly destroy the stock price by reducing holdings too much.
Another very important point is that when stock swaps are done properly, there is almost no tax to pay.
Simon was a person who valued efficiency very much. He finalized the plan and released the news on the same day. Then, even though there were not many people who could directly contact Simon, his personal phone calls were still bombarded.
There is no way, anyone with a discerning eye can see that after the Southeast Asian financial turmoil last year, the U.S. dollar returned, and the U.S. stock market began to recover rapidly in less than a year after experiencing a brief downturn after the Nasdaq crashed in March 1997, especially technology stocks. , with the rapid development of companies such as Igret, Tinker Bayer, AOL, and Verizon, the stock prices have begun to soar again.
In this case, it is very cost-effective to trade the stocks in your hands that are growing slowly or even lack growth potential for the stocks of new technology stocks that are growing rapidly in the Westeros system.
As for the bubble
Of course everyone knows that there is a bubble in Nasdaq, but human nature is like this. Many people always think that they can avoid the bubble and leave the market early.
Then, after receiving confirmation from the top management of the Westeros system, the media began to follow up, and even Washington paid attention. The president personally had a phone call with Simon to confirm that someone was not trying to destroy the market, and then he felt relieved. In the future, even if Clinton’s most important series of electoral hurdles in the past eight years have passed after the central district election, and there will be no next term, he still hopes that the new technology market will start well and end well during his term.
Therefore, in just a few days, even though the specific replacement plan was not yet clear and needed to be explored in actual operations, Westeros Company quickly received applications for stock replacement transactions with a total value of more than 30 billion US dollars.
November 26th, Thanksgiving Day.
Simon's family continued to spend time in New York, and Sofia Fesi also came from Europe, making the family lively.
After Thanksgiving, time is about to enter December.
This past week, in addition to the Westeros system stock exchange plan that is making a lot of noise, there is also Ygritte. This Monday, a role-playing online game from South Korea was also launched, "Wind of the Wind". "Kingdom", the name is actually the same as the Chinese one, but the logo that it is actually the second part has been removed because it is unnecessary.
Relying on Ygritte's much larger user platform than Daenerys and the strong discounts in the early stages of operation, as of Thursday, just three days before Thanksgiving, "The Kingdom of the Wind" only had the number of activated users in North America. It quickly exceeded 2.7 million.
The amazing results have made the game industry once again exclaim that the era of online games is coming.
Just like the Japanese stand-alone Korean network, the development of the technology tree of the game industry does not definitely point in one direction. As a series of online games that continue to test the waters have achieved strong responses in North America, Simon also has to wonder whether the stand-alone game industry will He was severely squeezed because of his own tactics.
However, Simon has no intention of changing the development plans for his own game console.
Again, the current Westeros system has a high enough fault tolerance rate. If it turns out that the direction is wrong in the future, then just reduce investment. After all, from the beginning, Simon did not put all his money into one direction, or even More energy is invested in the other direction.
…
After Thanksgiving, the second box office week of the Thanksgiving season from November 20 to November 26 comes to an end.
The superimposition of many new films in the past two weeks has made the total North American box office this week easily exceed 200 million US dollars.
There is not much suspense. As a super blockbuster sequel, "The Mummy 2" easily topped the box office in its first week of release. The film earned US$71.34 million in the first seven days. Obviously, there is a significant gap from last week's "The Mummy" which grossed more than 90 million U.S. dollars in its first week. However, again, "The Mummy" is just a special case. "The Mummy 2" can gross more than 70 million in its first week, which means that it has There is great hope for the local 200 million, and this has been very successful.
The second place was both unexpected and expected, "Collision", with a box office of US$51.29 million in the next week, and a cumulative box office of US$144.56 million in two weeks.
It was unexpected because Bai Ge Wu's new film "American Police", which also attracted much attention before, failed to even win the runner-up.
As expected, it is still "American Police". As a traditional action thriller similar to the theme of "The Fugitive", even if the reputation is not bad, Baige Wu also performs normally, but the problem is that in "The Mummy 2", Against the backdrop of blockbusters with visual spectacles like "Collision", audiences are obviously still more willing to enter the theater to watch a CG visual feast.
The trend cannot be reversed.
In any case, with a huge investment of US$100 million, Paramount spared no effort in promotion and distribution. "American Police" finally occupied the third position, earning US$39.17 million in the first seven days.
It's not a box office failure, but it has absolutely nothing to do with success.
What everyone can see may just be that with the film's first week of 39.17 million US dollars, in 1998, it seems that there is finally hope for a movie with a box office of over 100 million dollars from another studio that has nothing to do with Daenerys Entertainment.