He is. It’s obviously a plot.
Pay the repair workers minimum wage, adventurers keep all that cash, they use all that cash on trading post trades, getting him even more money (net profit=up) from the sales tax!
It’s one massive plot to gain money and put those repair workers starving.
No it’s even bigger than that. In fact, it’s bigger than you could possibly imagine. What if I told you that the gold we use in our currency is not in fact real gold? Would you believe me if I told you that our copper silver and gold are ALL mass produced by the Black Lion Trading Co? You better believe it baby. Take a look at your coins and you’ll find a small print that says, “Black Lion TC note.”
Our currency is not backed by any items of real value other than itself. It’s just mass produced at will and distributed throughout Tyria with little regard for matters such as inflation. Look at the cost of gems and legendary weapons compared to the prices of last year. Our worldwide currency is quickly losing its value.
The BLTC is privately owned and the company runs most of its exterior operations through privately hired merchants. The BLTC gains most of its power through loans and bonds. It gives out loans to various large organizations throughout Tyria. For example, the Iron Legion was modernized with the help of BLTC loans. Due to high interest rates, the Iron Legion pays approximately 15% of its public funding straight back into the BLTC’s pockets. To help balance out the costs of BLTC loans, Smodur the Unflinching continues to heavily invest into various BLTC bonds. All these bonds offer guaranteed interest returns and some bonds even allow the buyer to cash back the bonds at any given moment. Since BLTC can manufacture an infinite amount of currency, it doesn’t matter if bond holders profit greatly from interest. BLTC’s power stems from the supremacy of the coins. As long as coins are used by Tyrians to exchange goods, as long as Tyrians believe that this flat currency has any real value, BLTC will continue to control all of Tyria.
Just a short while ago, Scarlet challenged the supremacy of the coins. Scarlet embraced the idea of Pan-Dragonism, an ideology that encourages the cooperation between Elder Dragons and Tyrians. She gathered Tyrians and formed three alliance, molten, aetherblade, and toxic, to aid her purpose of Dragon-Tyrian unification. The BLTC sought interest in Scarlet’s large amounts of watchwork sprockets and so for a short while, Scarlet enjoyed good business with the BLTC. However, one day Scarlet rejected gold to sprocket transactions and instead offered to trade ectos-sprockets instead. The BLTC feared that the coin supremacy would be overhauled by an ectoplasm based economy. Although the BLTC already holds a very large sum of ectoplasms, they cannot manufacture ectoplasms at will. Ectos are always backed by Crystalline Dusts and are therefore more stable than the flat coin system. Fearing for their loss of economic supremacy, Evon Gnashblade orchestrated a string of false flag attacks on Tyria to demonize Scarlet. The Dragon Bash incident, Queen’s Jubilee, the Tower of Nightmares, and the destruction of Lion’s Arch was all manipulated by the Black Lion Trading Company. With the use of heavy propaganda and hired thugs (Marjory Delaqua, Kasmeer Meade, Braham Eirsson, Rox Pickheart, and many others) they managed to fool Tyria into believing that Scarlet was some evil lunatic bent on destroying Tyria. As her final act of rebellion, Scarlet awoke an elder dragon to continue on the battle against the coin supremacy after her assassination.
“Caithe, someday you’ll see. Tyria needs me.”
