In an earlier and somewhat excessive draft of this post, I added a note on financial regulation, which in our world tends to come mostly from various supranational bodies and nations creating it via treaty powers and then backfitting the result to domestic law.
There, contrariwise, financial regulation tends to be sourced from three places:
- established meta-policy of Gilea & Company and the First Mercantile Bank of Ólish;
- the operations manual of the Imperial Banking & Credit Weave; and
- the monthly dinners of the High Guild of Coin and Credit.
These notably being places that love the principle behind money and the integrity of the financial system far, far more than anything else. (Princes and peoples, powers and policies, they come and go. Money is eternal.) And all of the most senior responsible people are undenotres of the Court of Courts, so what they come up with can be relied upon to have the full backing of the Empire.
(They are also, for the most part, part of Gilea Cheraelar’s clientele, so it can be safely be assumed that little escapes the watchful eye and gold-clad fist of the Old Lady of Coinclink Lane.)
But what of the rest of the Worlds?
Well, technically, every sovereign polity can make whatever financial regulations it likes. However, in practice:
- the Empire has a Presidium seat and is one of the powers that architected the Accord on Trade and the Plexus Free Trade Alliance in the first place;
- it still takes a great deal of interest in the Galactic Trade Association that that Accord created;
- in galactic banking, Gilea & Company and the First Mercantile Bank of Ólish are kind of big deals, and hold the ends of a lot of strings;
- likewise, the Seranth Exchange is the biggest marketplace anywhere;
- the most universal payment rail in the Worlds, the Accord Exval Transfer Network, in practice differs from the Imperial Banking & Credit Weave only in primary denomination, and is run by a great many of the same people;
- the Galactic Financial Documentation Standards are very heavily cribbed from the Hundred Precise Protocols of the Integral Accountant;
- etc., etc.
All of these, of course, are perfectly voluntary institutions to join, standards to use, and so forth. If you want to get out from under the Old Lady’s eye to practice the kind of bullshit up with which she will not put¹, you can do it.
But much like applying vigorous and strict economic sanctions to yourself, doing so may not work out ultimately to your credit.
- She won’t help you, though. Enforcement is your own problem, and the Old Lady doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with people using overweave-encrypted protocols to do covert banking with Enth Cryptic no matter what the local yokels have to say about it.