Consortium of Measures

The Consortium of Measures is an interordinate institution headquartered in the Prysostaic School which is broadly responsible for oversight and regulation of the financial system of Vaestdom. Established in 1789, the Consortium is technically part of the Office of the Treasury and therefore the broader administrative machinery of the Offices of the Prysostaia, in practice the Consortium serves as the main venue for co-operation between the banks of Vaestdom (both central and merchant), some 117 of which are represented on its various committees and boards and hold stakes in its banking activities. As well as more arcane and ritual functions, over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries it has acquired far-reaching monetary and financial powers that place it at the heart of the Vaestic economy. In particular, it is responsible for modifying official exchange rates and providing credits to settle short-term balance of payments deficits. It also sets various reference rates for interordinate banking, and hosts one of the largest auctions of Messenian currencies in Outer Joriscia. Since the 1970s, acting as a consortium, it has become a major issuer of sovereign debt, as well as providing extensive funds to estates active outside Outer Joriscia itself (although the extent of the Consortium's exposure to this sort of venture remains unclear to orientalists at present). As the name suggests, a portion of the Consortium - although administratively largely separate from the banking divisions - also manages metrological standards for Vaestdom as a whole, including such issues as the application of the Vaestic day outside continental Outer Joriscia. It is governed by the Audition Board, currently consisting of seventeen senior bankers and seven Scholars representing the Ordinary Banners.

The Consortium of Measures can be traced back to the Neritsovid-era Grand Imperial Office of Weights and Measures, whose First Auditor was one of the senior functionaries of the Neritsovid government and had responsibility for both weights and measures and for the Pestul Mint. Valtor Okko, the then incumbent First Auditor, was probably the driving figure behind the re-establishment of Prysostaic authority. Much of the machinery of Neritsovid-era government long survived, at least notionally, but with the steady collapse of the universal empire over the course of the 18th century, and at the Treaty of Tharamann (1845) - which effectively dismantled universalism in practice, while projecting much of its aesthetic and theory onto the Prysostaia - it was decided that the maintenance of standardised weights and measures was one of the functions of the Universal Prophet (as opposed to the Emperor, whose functions were inherited by the sovereigns of Azophin, Terophan and Lacre jointly and severally). Although the Treaty envisioned the reestablishment of a separate Grand Office to this end, by this point the historic responsibilities of the Office of Weights and Measures had been absorbed into Universal Prophet Mezveim's (r. 1817-1833) reorganised Office of the Treasury, and the Consortium was thus set up under the Treasury's ambit instead. As one of its key functions was to further the harmonisation of silver fineness underpinning the new Tharamann monetary regime, from its very beginning it brought together banking establishments from across Outer Joriscia. It also acquired the credentialing power to designate so-called manual banks or hand banks, by this point essentially a diplomatic nicety allowing banks to operate in multiple Banner-States.

The Consortium's basic formal role remained largely unchanged until the Long War, but informally it increasingly served as an informal venue for bankers and financiers to coordinate their activities and lend one another money, particularly those who operated in multiple jurisdictions; the 'Foremost Banks of the Consortium' moreover regularly lent money as a common entity and provided prestigious accepting functions by guaranteeing the value of bills. Moreover, although the first Auditors were Scholars appointed by the Treasurer, from the late 1890s onwards the position was typically appointed by one of the three great Banks of the Prysostaia, who seem to have been granted this honour in implicit exchange for supporting the government through the disastrous Bes Doun crisis (although the exact details of how this convention arose remain unclear to Western scholarship). The rule of the Prysostaic houses was in turn overthrown by the largest foreign banks after the events of the Thrall and the Congress of Kethpor, with the Terophite Hvamhesham Doun appointed as Auditor as part of the setting up of the Terophatic Ascendancy, under which the Consortium played a supervisory role in the Terophan-centric Joriscian financial system that remained in place until the Terophatic Implosion of 1979-1980. This role was formalised at the Congress of Molot in 1983, which essentially created the Consortium as it is today by replacing the Auditor with a committee of senior bankers modelled on the Panarchate.

The Consortium is a controversial institution within Vaestdom. Although public criticism by policymakers is unusual, its de facto autonomy within the hierarchy sits uneasily with the closely integrated and rationalised chain of sovereignty that characterises conventional Vaestopolitical thought, and it is regularly targeted by heresiarchs of various stripes as well as more orthodox statolaters. More prosaically, the requirements of the extensive commercial activities of the Foremost Banks are often not readily reconciled with its functions as Outer Joriscia's guarantor of trade and macroeconomic stability. This has led to occasional attempts to reform the Consortium or impose additional outside control on its activities. In the aftermath of the 1999 Massacre of the Estates, in which it was repeatedly implied that misconduct at the Consortium had played a role (although the exact details remain subject to conjecture), Scholarly supervision was notionally imposed on the Consortium for the first time in over a century, with representatives of the Ordinary Banners joining the Audition Board. More dramatically, in 2018 four members of the Consortium were subjected to character judgement after they were found to have colluded in misappropriation of funds, an unusual case of public punishment. In practice, however, these attempts seem to have had little influence on the body's internal workings.