This is Chapter 5 of The Universal Good Deal, you may want to start at the beginning or go back to Chapter 4.

On the day that the Aliens arrived, Welles was planning an invasion of a small nation of islands the Martians called the Bahamas.

Because the Martians had not yet moved beyond primitive attitudes towards money, they were very superstitious about it. As a result, they frequently required a physical manifestation of their money (paper notes were used most commonly, no doubt from a lack of imagination), and universally held that their governments were solely responsible for its production. As you might expect, this led to a disastrous volatility in their economies, which routinely erupted in crises and caused much misery.

The nation of which Welles was now the leader had a reputation for rather more stability than average. But like all Martian nations, they printed many notes of different denominations. The notes they printed of higher denominations were rarely useful in the transactions of the populace, but were desired by the citizens of other less-stable states as makeshift stores of wealth. Entering into circulation, many of these high-denomination notes quickly found their way to foreign lands where they were stuffed into mattresses and hoarded in caves. Indeed, it seems that criminal organizations also sought such money because it was widely accepted and difficult to trace. Welles, and those who had governed before her, were fully cognizant of these facts, continuing to print the money because it was profitable.

Welles often exclaimed, 'Printing hundreds is a fantastic way of making money.'

There were numerous and large bureaucracies charged with tracking the number of notes in circulation, but it was convenient for the government not to make too strenuous an effort to count all those notes beyond their borders. Indeed, they came into the habit of treating them as if they did not exist. Welles would have continued this convenient course of action had it not become known to her through several channels of subterfuge that a foreign actor had been slowly amassing a huge store of these notes, consolidating them, with the intention of selling them en masse at a discount, and so completely demolishing her nation's currency.¹

If details of such an arcane system are somewhat tedious, I only dwell on them now in order that you should understand the several catastrophes that were about to be set in motion.

Now, I am told that the Martians of the time were not so backwards as to rely solely on physical representations of money; indeed, such forms of money may have represented a relatively small fraction of their supply. But it is nonetheless true that the physical money held disproportionate sway. As went the cash, so went the market.

Welles' sources were unable to determine who was behind this plot, but they did provide her with information equally useful: the notes were secretly being stored in the Bahamas. Welles intended to invade the island nation in order to seize the cash, and she had summoned Matthew Flinders, the advertising genius, to devise a strategy to justify her actions to the public.