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Dear eBE citizens,

After my previous mandate and being re-installed as Minister of Finances, I’m writing a short article about the past month: what has been done and achieved, and what are the plans on the short term.

Monetary Market
The government has made some intervention on the monetary market. Around two weeks ago, the BEF to GOLD rate rose from 1 BEF = 0.019 G to 1 BEF = 0.023 G and even higher some moments. I have immediately put BEF from the national bank and the state companies on the market. Working together with the Congress, another 10,000 BEF was printed and put on the market against 0.019 GOLD per BEF. This amount was nearly completely sold, when the market stabilized again, and the price remained stable at 0.019 BEF.

A danger of this kind of intervention is that too much BEF will come on the market, crashing the prices down. At the moment, offers of 1 BEF = 0.018 G start popping up. NBB-BNB has bought and will buy all offers of 0.018 GOLD in order to keep the exchange rate stable. The recent changes in the game are already of a very big impact to the world-wide economy, and with keeping the rates stable, we try to make eBelgium a stable business environment.

Some nice side-effects are that buying up the offers of 0.018 will immediately give the people offering the amount the gold they wish for their BEF, so that they can invest it in – for example – new companies. This would be good for economy. Secondly, note that for every BEF bought back this way, we make a small profit for the state, as they were once sold at 0.019 G and now bought back at 0.018 G. This might seem small, but with traded amounts of normally around 5,000 BEF the impact is quite nice.

On behalf of the government, I will continue to provide eBelgium with a stable currency in these economic turbulent times.

eBE Grain operational
After an initial laisser-faire policy on the grain prices – which saw the prices successfully stabilize around 0.09 BEF –, I decided to reopen eBE Grain in Slovakia and import to eBelgium after prices raised to 0.19 BEF per grain. This effectively helped the prices lower to the current 0.12 / 0.13 BEF per grain. However, the wages in Slovakia are very high, and a debate is going on how we should improve this. Possibilities are to open up new grain companies in low wage countries, or to migrate our current iron companies (one time opportunity).

Do you have a suggestion? Register on the eBelgium forums and participate in the debate! You can join the forum on http://ebelgium.forumotion.net .

For the moment, eBE Grain will remain open to keep the prices of grain – and thus the prices of the food everyone of us eats every day – at an acceptable rate.

50 GOLD issue
We have had some troubles in finding 50 GOLD which belonged to the state. They were taken out of the eBE Raw organization around 2 months ago, but after efforts of ThomasRED (amongst others), the full amount of GOLD has been returned to eBE Raw by an anonymous monetary market transaction.

I am sorry I couldn’t inform you earlier of this missing amount, but this would have jeopardized the investigation. However, I am glad this case can now be closed.

Coming up
This month, the main focus of the government will be on economy.

The plans on short-term are – besides the stable currency and grain production – to propose a consistent tax structure to the Congress, with the changes made to the game (resources!) implemented in this. This would include a good business environment for companies in our new high resource iron-region and low import taxes for grain.

To ensure a production of raws and products when prices rise too much, we will keep the state companies operational or open them up. This is a very important aspect of next month’s policy, and therefore we have Helviro in the government’s team to minister the state companies. I’m looking forward to the cooperation with this new ministry.

Do you have any suggestions on how to improve the economy of eBelgium? You know how to make it known: send me a PM, or – even better – join the forum!

I look forward to see you there.

Kind regards,

Your Minister of Finances,
Boklevski