Where does MAlign get it's money?

I would imagine a lot of it comes from illegal sources. Just like North Korea who pilfered billions from the US, it was stolen from the Sol system. And they could have stolen from other systems as well. Like Mesa. I can only hope to imagine how the huge cash cow that is the SL was milked of funds. The MA had access to nanites. Those nanites would have had other uses than to kill. They could have been used to make a killing. I also can't stop imagining that the MA could have operated the most successful piracy program in history, with invisible ships. Though I can't imagine why the author would fail to share that tidbit. At any rate, the MA could have operated a piracy by proxy program.

I would tend to think the Alignment's biggest problem was laundering dirty money and hidden corporations.

penny wrote:I would imagine a lot of it comes from illegal sources. Just like North Korea who pilfered billions from the US, it was stolen from the Sol system. And they could have stolen from other systems as well. Like Mesa. I can only hope to imagine how the huge cash cow that is the SL was milked of funds. The MA had access to nanites. Those nanites would have had other uses than to kill. They could have been used to make a killing. I also can't stop imagining that the MA could have operated the most successful piracy program in history, with invisible ships. Though I can't imagine why the author would fail to share that tidbit. At any rate, the MA could have operated a piracy by proxy program.

I would tend to think the Alignment's biggest problem was laundering dirty money and hidden corporations.

Well the MAlign doesn't have very many invisible ships - any they haven't had them for very long. IIRC less than 20 Sharks and probably that again in Ghosts -- and only for a few years.

They needed to get the bulk of their money decades or centuries ago. Long before they had invisible spider ships.

But we know that the Mesan based transstellars have long funded normal piracy - such as in Silesia. And the MAlign had their fingers deep into those pies. So, yes, some of their money was from piracy; just not piracy with spider ships.

Jonathan_S wrote:

penny wrote:I would imagine a lot of it comes from illegal sources. Just like North Korea who pilfered billions from the US, it was stolen from the Sol system. And they could have stolen from other systems as well. Like Mesa. I can only hope to imagine how the huge cash cow that is the SL was milked of funds. The MA had access to nanites. Those nanites would have had other uses than to kill. They could have been used to make a killing. I also can't stop imagining that the MA could have operated the most successful piracy program in history, with invisible ships. Though I can't imagine why the author would fail to share that tidbit. At any rate, the MA could have operated a piracy by proxy program.

I would tend to think the Alignment's biggest problem was laundering dirty money and hidden corporations.

Well the MAlign doesn't have very many invisible ships - any they haven't had them for very long. IIRC less than 20 Sharks and probably that again in Ghosts -- and only for a few years.

They needed to get the bulk of their money decades or centuries ago. Long before they had invisible spider ships.

But we know that the Mesan based transstellars have long funded normal piracy - such as in Silesia. And the MAlign had their fingers deep into those pies. So, yes, some of their money was from piracy; just not piracy with spider ships.

Points taken. I certainly should have considered when the spider drives were available.

Now that I think of it, Albrecht and other entities of the Alignment might have many patents in the wild. However the legality of patents work in the HV.

penny wrote:Now that I think of it, Albrecht and other entities of the Alignment might have many patents in the wild. However the legality of patents work in the HV.

You don't patent anything you want to keep secret. As part of the patent is openly documenting your invention, in exchange for a time limited, government granted monopoly.

So things like "patented trade secret" I sometimes see advertised are a nice contradiction.

markusschaber wrote:

penny wrote:Now that I think of it, Albrecht and other entities of the Alignment might have many patents in the wild. However the legality of patents work in the HV.

You don't patent anything you want to keep secret. As part of the patent is openly documenting your invention, in exchange for a time limited, government granted monopoly.

So things like "patented trade secret" I sometimes see advertised are a nice contradiction.

I would imagine the MA has a lot of technology and research that it has unclassified for profit. Technology and research that, as far as they are concerned, has no military value.

They have a lot of shadow companies. Companies oftentimes have patents. The MA has to dabble in the real world. Those companies provide a possible avenue of laundering money and they also provide extra security via a man in the middle. For example, the operation on Mesa at one point.

I hadn't thought of the money that results from investment over a long span of time, compound interest on steroids as it were.

After all the Manticore colony trust fund made a lot of money during the 600 years that the initial investment from their left overs after paying for the MBS and paying for their ship. So if the MAlign were to have continually invested and reinvested from the profits I suppose that could result in a very large sum,

Mycall4me wrote:I hadn't thought of the money that results from investment over a long span of time, compound interest on steroids as it were.

After all the Manticore colony trust fund made a lot of money during the 600 years that the initial investment from their left overs after paying for the MBS and paying for their ship. So if the MAlign were to have continually invested and reinvested from the profits I suppose that could result in a very large sum,

On that note, they could have gotten rich on Leonard's insurance policy.

penny wrote:

Mycall4me wrote:I hadn't thought of the money that results from investment over a long span of time, compound interest on steroids as it were.

After all the Manticore colony trust fund made a lot of money during the 600 years that the initial investment from their left overs after paying for the MBS and paying for their ship. So if the MAlign were to have continually invested and reinvested from the profits I suppose that could result in a very large sum,

On that note, they could have gotten rich on Leonard's insurance policy.

Too true!

penny wrote:I would imagine a lot of it comes from illegal sources. Just like North Korea who pilfered billions from the US, it was stolen from the Sol system.

I think they were stealing the half-centicredit rounding errors from the League transactions. So long as they didn't get the decimal in the wrong place, of course.

It has always seemed that the Alignment had a major -of hidden- stake in Technodyne and it certainly was able to use it's connections and control there to feed materials including ships into various operations such as trying to use Monica to take the Lynx terminus from Manticore or at least force a shooting war between the SL and Manticore over Monica seizing the terminus.

Technodyne sold a lot of ships and other materials to many systems and governments including the SL. From comments scattered though the books, the Alignment had many lines of investment and control into many Transtellars and that was both conduits for it to influence or control systems and to make/divert money to places they wanted it to be. While it is not clear where exactly all the ships that were eventually were identified as the movement of materials and people to Galton actually came from, it is unlikely that all that much would have come from Darius. Too much traffic. But equipment and ships purchased through Transtellars like Technodyne plus the labor force which may have been genetic slaves out of the Manpower label would just be another way of making money or using cover operations to hide where things came from.