By the time he went solo, Hoover was less an engineer than what we might recognize today as the head of a private equity firm.11 He had a few stakes in genuinely productive mines, and new techniques for processing mine tailings for their base metals led to novel Westralia revenue, but finance ruled the world now. He found that rationalization and efficiency were good ways to attract capital, but the ultimate results didn’t always correlate with his gains. Hoover didn’t have to invest a ton of money or reorganize production in order to prosper on a new project. He just had to convince other financiers that something previously uninvestable was now a good bet; then he could sell them his stake at a profit and do it again. Instead of South Africa and Westralia, his five offices were in San Francisco, New York, London, Paris, and Petrograd. In the years following settlement of the Russo-Japanese War he advised both the Russian czar and Japanese capital on carving up the Siberia-Korea-Manchuria nexus, but he spent most of his time in the world’s Paper Belt, traveling between his five offices and Belgium, where a spike in rubber prices combined with the Crown’s superexploitation of African slave labor on the Congo plantations enriched King Leopold II and his affiliated financiers.