It really depends what said galactic economy is based around. What are the main forms of produced/consumed goods? How much trade is going on, across what distances and using what infrastructure? Is everyone using a shared currency? Is value of currency regulated by governments, or by cryptography (e.g. a bitcoin-like system)?
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It's a pretty varied economy, and all of the races have a standard line of currency the Credit, (yeah yeah so original).But each Credit can be exchanged into the currencies of their home races. I.e the credit can be exchanged for dollars, yen, etc. The credit has a managed floating exchange rate, calculated in real time by the central bank to maintain the average value of all participating currencies. Some regional currencies are worth more than a credit, and some less
main form of goods are just standard electronics, medicine, food, basically what we trade now on Earth. However, since the arrival of humanity, military tech has now HEAVILY regulated and restricted, and as such a cold war is building up.
Primarily trade is done through a relay gates that allow FTL. Ships can do FTL themselves, but it's far slower than the relay gates which are major hubs to the other sides of the galaxy.
Hope that helps
Trashing the banking databases can do a lot of damage indeed, provided you can get to the backups too, but I'm thinking at least some of the backups will not be online in any way to prevent exactly that. And even the main databases will be hardened against this kind of thing.
If you prefer to be more subtle, there's got to be a way to engineer a financial crash. Unfortunately I'm not an economist so I'm not much help. IIRC flooding an economy with counterfeit money will create problems, though I'm not sure how that would work in an all-electronic financial system, besides the aforementioned viral attack.
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Counterfeiting should be even easier with electronic money. You don't even need a printing press with special ink and material. All you need is to hack in and play with numbers.
Hum... I'm not an economist myself, but could an artificially-created economic bubble do some damage? I have in mind the Extra History series on the South Sea Bubble, and my thought is to have an inserted agent (or set of agents) engage in some such scheme intentionally.
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You can damage an economy using such means, but you wont cripple it that way. Ultimately an economy is based on individuals and organizations exchanging things of value with each other- unless you can somehow prevent them from exchanging goods and services in a market, they will continue to have an economy. If they know that the damage was done by an external enemy then I think it's only a matter of time before they reorganize themselves and come after the human race.
It depends on how quickly it needs to happen.
If the economy has to collapse quickly, then yes, you're going to have to go with something that's a little unrealistic. But I would use a sort of "physical illness" virus rather than a computer virus in that case, as that's somewhat easier to believe without Fridge Logic kicking in.
If you've got time, I'd either bribe/lobby alien lawmakers to write a bunch of dumb energy laws (remember the California energy crisis of 2000-01
?) or shut down inter-planetary trade somehow.
What about a partial-collapse? I'm trying to set the seeds for a civil war between the aliens, because of hard economic times.
@3: How do these gates work? It sounds like taking control of them in some way might be a good first step.
For instance, if a certain region relies on a nearby gate for certain kinds of goods, sabotaging the gate for an extended length of time would cause the value of those goods to skyrocket in that area, while dropping in whatever regions specialize in covering that demand. This could have a variety of nasty consequences: People in the cut-off region start hoarding and fighting over the scarce goods, industries in the supplying regions are forced to shut down, and everyone starts hedging their bets a little more because they don't know when the same sort of thing might happen again. And if you can frame somebody else for the sabotage by scheduling it at a moment when they'll reap the greatest benefit, that's even better.
If the humans aren't trading with the aliens, then the only way for them to affect the aliens' economies is through direct acts of war.
Let me explain. See, the simplest, easiest, and most common way to shake up an economic system is to deprive it of previously-abundant commodities. These could be fuels like petrol, uranium and energy crystals, raw materials like metals, woods, chemicals and textiles, or foods like vegetables, cereals, meats and spices.
As Supply of these commodities shrinks but Demand remains steady, their prices rise, along with the prices of goods that make use of them. As the prices of goods rise, average citizens suffer, as they can become unable to pay for basic necessities such as food, clothing or electricity. If the shortages last too long, the government may have to institute rationing to ensure all their citizens get enough to live. And if the shortages get especially dire, society may well collapse, as basic infrastructure grinds to a halt, and law and order gives way to anarchy and hoarding.
On a broader, macro level, fluctuating prices would also scare off investors, who don't want to take a risk in such an unstable and volatile market. As private investment halts, so too does economic growth, and the economy enters a period of recession. Mass unemployment, inflation, bankruptcy and all manner of civil unrest soon follows.
Unfortunately for the humans, they've decided not to trade with the aliens. If they had, and they had some valuable commodity that only they could provide, then they'd have some leverage over the aliens. They could offer better prices to willing client states, or threaten to cut off trade unless their demands were met.
But by restricting all trade, the humans have left themselves only one option: seizing the aliens' resources by force. Obviously, this course of action is fraught with problems:
1. Presumably the whole point of destabilising the aliens' economies and causing civil wars is to avoid open war with the aliens, or to alleviate pressure in a war that's already raging. In either case, attacking the aliens outright (or attacking them some more) isn't going to help.
2. Such acts of open aggression are extremely unlikely to trigger civil wars. In fact, they're more likely to unite the aliens against a common enemy, and galvanize their resistance. See the UK during the Blitz: the people suffered, but they knew their suffering was the work of the Germans, which steeled their resolve against the Reich.
3. If the aliens have any sense, they'd counteract the recession by selling war bonds, which would stimulate their economy, curb inflation, and give their governments much-needed funds for their wars with the humans.
4. Attacking the aliens' resources in order to disrupt their economies and cause civil wars, is functionally identical to attacking the aliens' resources to destroy their capacity to wage war and force their surrender. The latter plan just has a more straightforward and achievable goal, and if the humans had any sense it's what they'd be doing in the first place.
Really, if the humans want to weaken the aliens by secretly orchestrating civil wars, then their best bet would be to fund radical secessionist, independence or civil rights movements within the aliens' populations, and let the resulting political strife run its course. That would be much more reliable and straightforward than meddling in economics.
To destroy an economic system all you need to do is destroy trust in said economic system. Any economy beyond the local subsistence level only works as long as people believe it does...Clap Your Hands If You Believe is basically one of the primary principles of economics.
edited 22nd Jun '15 12:51:15 AM by MattStriker
While true, just going around saying "by the way, money is a lie", isn't going to convince anyone to stop using it. Yes. currency, especially fiat currency, is an elaborate societal fiction. But it's also one of societies' most powerful and useful fictions, so it's not likely to be abandoned on a whim.
edited 22nd Jun '15 2:00:01 AM by Tungsten74
True. But what I'm talking about is something like generating distrust in the safety of investments and savings which is very much possible if you have the necessary intelligence and propaganda resources. A bank run is capable of crippling a nation overnight. A bank run on a galactic scale? The results would be spectacular, colorful and very, very violent. Admittedly it'd be quite hard (probably close to impossible) to pull off successfully in a single stroke, but generating a cascade effect might be an option.
Of course, any opposing nation that isn't run by complete idiots is going to realize what's going on and take steps to at least mitigate the effect...
You could start a financial bubble and then cause it to pop without warning but this requires that you dupe most of the population.
Regardless of how you do it, remember Sun Tsu. Don't give away the plot until you're ready to strike and then strike all at once.
If you ignored my previous giant post, I'll just post the TL;DR version here:
If you want to start a civil war in a foreign nation, just cut out the middleman and fund radical insurgent groups directly. It'll be far more reliable and straightforward than whatever hare-brained ponzi schemes you can think of, and be a lot easier to keep secret than a giant economic conspiracy.
It would also make at least some of the aliens' populace see you as an ally who supports their cause, rather than a meddling enemy out to weaken and conquer them. Plus, it'll give you a pool of local leaders you can install as puppets when you eventually annex their worlds.
edited 29th Jun '15 4:23:58 PM by Tungsten74
Economies are quite resilient. Even if your virus succeeds, their economy will survive.
What Tungsten said about funding radical insurgent groups is a nice idea. Disrupting communications and travel between planets is another idea, but I have no idea how you could do it, without starting a war. Maybe by state sanctioned pirates?
In my story humanity is outnumbered by a faction of Alien races (however, humanity has them outgunned technologically), and an organization wants to prevent the aliens from having time to reverese engineer human tech (despite trade embargoes, they know SOMETHING is going to leak eventually). So they plot to bring the aliens to civil war by trashing their economy and allowing humanity (who has several aliens under its banner) to slowly absorb them and take over the galaxy.
How would you go about doing this? I was thinking an AI would upload a virus in the central banking system and its spreads galactic wide, wiping out debts, savings, retirement, etc.
But my knowledge of economics is sparse. Anyone willing to lend a helping hand?