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This dish should come in another six weeks in this climate.
The new peas will be showing up in the market about then.
The fresh tarragon is not in my lexicon. I will have to add it.
Veal has moved from an inevitability of dairy farming to an ethnic luxury.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dairy_farming#Calf_Management_for_the_Dairy_Herd
Calf Management for the Dairy Herd
The production of milk requires that the cow be in lactation, which is a result of the cow having given birth to a calf. The cycle of insemination, pregnancy, parturition, and lactation, followed by a "dry" period of about two months of forty-five to fifty days, before calving which allows udder tissue to regenerate. A dry period that falls outside this time frames can result in decreased milk production in subsequent lacation [24]. Dairy operations therefore include both the production of milk and the production of calves. Bull calves are either castrated and raised as steers for beef production or veal."http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dairy_cattle#Cow
"To maintain high milk production, a dairy cow must be bred and produce calves. Depending on market conditions, the cow may be bred with a "dairy bull" or a "beef bull." Female calves (heifers) with dairy breeding may be kept as replacement cows for the dairy herd. If a replacement cow turns out to be a substandard producer of milk, she then goes to market and can be slaughtered for beef. Male calves can either be used later as a breeding bull or sold and used for veal or beef. Dairy farmers usually begin breeding or artificially inseminating heifers around 13 months of age.[7] A cow's gestation period is approximately nine months.[8] Newborn calves are removed from their mothers quickly, usually within three days, as the mother/calf bond intensifies over time and delayed separation can cause extreme stress on the calf."
There is no room for romance in animal husbandry.
Buy the products from those who like the process.
Most producers want a place for the manure.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manure
I like cows.
I miss their presence.
I have no desire to try to make a business of them.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Things are happening in the financial world.
http://hat4uk.wordpress.com/2012/03/27/deutsche-bank-is-this-the-man-whose-actions-will-destroy-the-wests-economic-and-fiscal-fabric/
DEUTSCHE BANK: IS THIS THE MAN WHOSE ACTIONS WILL DESTROY THE WEST’S ECONOMIC AND FISCAL FABRIC?
The biggest bank in the EU is also one of the most over-leveraged and under-capitalised. The Slog offers a less than flattering portrait of the man at the top of Deutsche Bank.Equally, he has the same swaggering anti-politician, anti-regulation attitude that so marks out Lloyd Blankfein from the run of not quite so completely ignorant Wall Street bankers. Ackermann was among the first to chastise IMF bossette Christine Lagarde for having the temerity to suggest last year that some large European banks were in need of “urgent recapitalisation”. Sloggers will know already that I am no Lagarde fan – indeed, she did a volte-face herself on this very issue when she joined the IMF. But I have no hesitation on this occasion in saying she is right, and Ackermann is talking out of another orifice entirely, some distance from his mouth.
Ackermann’s bank – which has been assiduously adding assets as other lenders did the opposite – this week overtook France’s BNP Paribas SA to take back the mantle of being Europe’s largest bank. Its assets rose 14% to 2.16 trillion euros during the last 2011-12 fiscal year. But wise heads in both Europe and the US have their doubts about Herr Ackermann….and in my view, with a great deal of justification.
A year ago, MIT professor and former IMF staffer Simon Johnson called Deutsche CEO Josef Ackermann “one of the most dangerous bankers in the world.” He fingered Ackermann as the crazy author of Deutsche Bank’s longstanding profit target of 25% return on equity, and what he called “excessive risk taking” there. And London-based banking analyst at Mediobanca SpA Christopher Wheeler told Bloomberg this week that “leverage and lack of capital are impacting Deutsche Bank’s valuation”. The message is clear: there is too much risk on Deutsche’s balance sheet, and not enough capital to back it up. The motive behind this is, once again, greed. The higher a bank’s leverage, the higher the returns when times are good. And when times are bad, Ackermann is cute enough to think that he too is Too Big To Fail, and will be rescued by the taxpayer.
Greek debt purchased over the years by the bank offers a classic example. Last year, the Deutsche boss told a bankers’ seminar that many of them could be swallowed by competitors if they had to mark down their entire sovereign debt holdings to real-world market values. He told his audience that it was “stating the obvious that many European banks would not survive having to revalue sovereign debt held on the banking book at market levels”, an assertion that subsequent events might suggest was deranged rather than obvious. Nevertheless, having said this, once Josef Ackermann privately saw the writing on the wall – around July 2011 – he was quick to use his relationship with Merkel to organise a grubby deal restricting Beutsche Bank’s Greek haircut to 21%….the rest being digested by the unfortunate German taxpayer. Not many commentators are aware of the arrangement; but those in Berlin who detest Herr Ackermann are only too aware of it.
Largely as a result of that deal – and wacko Acko’s incessant anti-Government public statements – his previously close relations with Merkel have become distinctly chilly. The German chancellor believes European banks need more capital, and far stricter stress tests. Bizarrely, Ackermann’s stated view is that Deutsche Bank doesn’t need capital, and regards itself as above the stress-test ideas of ‘interfering politicians’. Bob Diamond, David Buik, Freddie Goodwin….they all spout the same MoU bollocks.
American regulators too have every reason to dislike this man whose self-belief is rarely borne out by events. When debt markets rallied in 2009, the bank posted a return on average equity of 14.6%. The following year, as Europe’s sovereign-debt crisis went from worse to awful, margins fell to 5.5%. Ackermann’s ‘business model’ is not that different from Northern Rock’s Adam Applegarth: it is built for good times, on the idiotic assumption that there will no longer be any bad times….or even worse, interesting times.
But bad times are always just around the corner for dumbos. Deutsche Bank was one of the largest recipients of US dollars in the aftermath of 2008. This received near-zero coverage in the financial media, but the fact remains that, just three few months before receiving billions of dollars from the Fed as part of the AIG fiasco, Ackermann had paid his shareholders some 2.6 billion euros in dividends. Since then, it has paid out an additional 1.7 billion in dividends. Be in no doubt: Josef Ackermann is a sort of libertarian/corporate Robin Hood: he believes in taking from the sovereign rich, and giving to the private stinking rich.
When Ackermann retires in two months time, his legacy is likely to be a balance sheet 40% bigger than that of 2006, and 80% of the entire size of the Bundesrepublik economy. In the light of any lessons learned at all from 2008 – and the completely potty idea of one bank with a balance sheet at four fifths of easily EU’s biggest economy – on the whole I think The Slog is justified in suggesting that Deutsche Bank is not so much an accident waiting to happen, as a certainty about to scorch the Earth of anyone speaking a European language.
And that includes, of course, the United States of America."
The slog is a gold bug at heart. He does not believe a liquidity trap is possible. Bernanke knows a liquidity trap is possible. He is ensnared in the politics of the reserve board and the Republican party.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/27/minksy-and-methodology-wonkish/
Minsky and Methodology (Wonkish)
Steve Keen has a new post up (with a link to a new paper) about Minksyan (Minskyite?) economics, and how people like me get it wrong. Good for him; debates like this are always productive, and I wish domestic responsibilities weren’t keeping me from going to the Berlin conference.
What I can do, however, is offer some brief notes on what puzzles me here, and why, I guess, I’ll never be a true Minskyite in Keen’s sense.
So, first of all, my basic reaction to discussions about What Minsky Really Meant — and, similarly, to discussions about What Keynes Really Meant — is, I Don’t Care. I mean, intellectual history is a fine endeavor. But for working economists the reason to read old books is for insight, not authority; if something Keynes or Minsky said helps crystallize an idea in your mind — and there’s a lot of that in both mens’ writing — that’s really good, but if where you take the idea is very different from what the great man said somewhere else in his book, so what? This is economics, not Talmudic scholarship.
And then the question is, how should one do economics?
I wrote about this a long time ago. In that piece, written around 1991, I laid out some rules for research; for now, let me just focus on the search for simplicity.
I always try to find the simplest representation I can of whatever story I’m trying to tell about the economy. The goal, in particular, is to identify which assumptions are really crucial — and in so doing to catch yourself when you’re making implicit assumptions that can’t stand clear scrutiny.
Keen doesn’t seem to be doing that. His paper contains a number of assertions about what is crucial, without much explanation of why these things are crucial. And I guess I just don’t see it.
In particular, he asserts that putting banks in the story is essential. Now, I’m all for including the banking sector in stories where it’s relevant; but why is it so crucial to a story about debt and leverage?
Keen says that it’s because once you include banks, lending increases the money supply. OK, but why does that matter? He seems to assume that aggregate demand can’t increase unless the money supply rises, but that’s only true if the velocity of money is fixed; so have we suddenly become strict monetarists while I wasn’t looking? In the kind of model Gauti and I use, lending very much can and does increase aggregate demand, so what is the problem?
Keen then goes on to assert that lending is, by definition (at least as I understand it), an addition to aggregate demand. I guess I don’t get that at all. If I decide to cut back on my spending and stash the funds in a bank, which lends them out to someone else, this doesn’t have to represent a net increase in demand. Yes, in some (many) cases lending is associated with higher demand, because resources are being transferred to people with a higher propensity to spend; but Keen seems to be saying something else, and I’m not sure what. I think it has something to do with the notion that creating money = creating demand, but again that isn’t right in any model I understand.
My point is that there seems to be a lot of implicit theorizing going on here — and at least at first glance, the implicit theorizing doesn’t make a lot of sense. I could be wrong, but that’s the whole point of simple models: to lay bare what you’re assuming, and make it clear what, specifically, is driving your conclusions.
I hope someone in Berlin presses Keen on all this."
What I can do, however, is offer some brief notes on what puzzles me here, and why, I guess, I’ll never be a true Minskyite in Keen’s sense.
So, first of all, my basic reaction to discussions about What Minsky Really Meant — and, similarly, to discussions about What Keynes Really Meant — is, I Don’t Care. I mean, intellectual history is a fine endeavor. But for working economists the reason to read old books is for insight, not authority; if something Keynes or Minsky said helps crystallize an idea in your mind — and there’s a lot of that in both mens’ writing — that’s really good, but if where you take the idea is very different from what the great man said somewhere else in his book, so what? This is economics, not Talmudic scholarship.
And then the question is, how should one do economics?
I wrote about this a long time ago. In that piece, written around 1991, I laid out some rules for research; for now, let me just focus on the search for simplicity.
I always try to find the simplest representation I can of whatever story I’m trying to tell about the economy. The goal, in particular, is to identify which assumptions are really crucial — and in so doing to catch yourself when you’re making implicit assumptions that can’t stand clear scrutiny.
Keen doesn’t seem to be doing that. His paper contains a number of assertions about what is crucial, without much explanation of why these things are crucial. And I guess I just don’t see it.
In particular, he asserts that putting banks in the story is essential. Now, I’m all for including the banking sector in stories where it’s relevant; but why is it so crucial to a story about debt and leverage?
Keen says that it’s because once you include banks, lending increases the money supply. OK, but why does that matter? He seems to assume that aggregate demand can’t increase unless the money supply rises, but that’s only true if the velocity of money is fixed; so have we suddenly become strict monetarists while I wasn’t looking? In the kind of model Gauti and I use, lending very much can and does increase aggregate demand, so what is the problem?
Keen then goes on to assert that lending is, by definition (at least as I understand it), an addition to aggregate demand. I guess I don’t get that at all. If I decide to cut back on my spending and stash the funds in a bank, which lends them out to someone else, this doesn’t have to represent a net increase in demand. Yes, in some (many) cases lending is associated with higher demand, because resources are being transferred to people with a higher propensity to spend; but Keen seems to be saying something else, and I’m not sure what. I think it has something to do with the notion that creating money = creating demand, but again that isn’t right in any model I understand.
My point is that there seems to be a lot of implicit theorizing going on here — and at least at first glance, the implicit theorizing doesn’t make a lot of sense. I could be wrong, but that’s the whole point of simple models: to lay bare what you’re assuming, and make it clear what, specifically, is driving your conclusions.
I hope someone in Berlin presses Keen on all this."
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/27/banking-mysticism/
Banking Mysticism
Reading the comments on my Steve Keen post, I had an insight: banking is where left and right meet. Both the Austrians — who believe that whatever the market does is right, unless it’s fractional reserve banking, which is somehow terrible — and the self-proclaimed true Minskyites view banks as institutions that are somehow outside the rules that apply to the rest of the economy, as having unique powers for good and/or evil.
I guess I don’t see it that way.
As I (and I think many other economists) see it, banks are a clever but somewhat dangerous form of financial intermediary, one that exploits the law of large numbers to offer a better tradeoff between liquidity and returns, but does so at the cost of taking on very high leverage, with all the risks that entails.The super-high leverage of banks, and the role of bank deposits as a key form of liquid assets, means that banks broadly defined are usually central players in financial crises. But that’s a quantitative thing, not a qualitative thing.
For in the end, banks don’t change the basic notion of interest rates as determined by liquidity preference and loanable funds — yes, both, because the message of IS-LM is that both views, properly understood, are correct. Banks don’t create demand out of thin air any more than anyone does by choosing to spend more; and banks are just one channel linking lenders to borrowers.
I know I’ll get the usual barrage of claims that I don’t understand banking; actually, I think I do, and it’s the mystics who have it wrong.
http://hat4uk.wordpress.com/2012/03/26/exclusive-greek-government-robbed-public-institutions-to-complete-bond-swap/
“But Lucas my dear, if you run out of poor people, you can always steal from the sick”
I guess I don’t see it that way.
As I (and I think many other economists) see it, banks are a clever but somewhat dangerous form of financial intermediary, one that exploits the law of large numbers to offer a better tradeoff between liquidity and returns, but does so at the cost of taking on very high leverage, with all the risks that entails.The super-high leverage of banks, and the role of bank deposits as a key form of liquid assets, means that banks broadly defined are usually central players in financial crises. But that’s a quantitative thing, not a qualitative thing.
For in the end, banks don’t change the basic notion of interest rates as determined by liquidity preference and loanable funds — yes, both, because the message of IS-LM is that both views, properly understood, are correct. Banks don’t create demand out of thin air any more than anyone does by choosing to spend more; and banks are just one channel linking lenders to borrowers.
I know I’ll get the usual barrage of claims that I don’t understand banking; actually, I think I do, and it’s the mystics who have it wrong.
http://hat4uk.wordpress.com/2012/03/26/exclusive-greek-government-robbed-public-institutions-to-complete-bond-swap/
EXCLUSIVE: GREEK GOVERNMENT ROBBED PUBLIC INSTITUTIONS TO COMPLETE BOND SWAP
“But Lucas my dear, if you run out of poor people, you can always steal from the sick”REVEALED: HOW VENIZELOS REGIME SECRETLY REMOVED 70% OF MAJOR HOSPITAL, UTILITY & UNIVERSITY BANK ACCOUNT FUNDS TO PAY BONDHOLDERS
Bank of Greece complicit in broadscale embezzlement revealed by respectable Greek health site
The illegally denied default of Greece entered a dramatic new phase this afternoon with the revelation by mainstream Greek public health website Health News that, shortly before midnight on March 8th – the eve of Greece’s psi completion on Friday March 9th – on average 70% of public utility funds in varous large, interest-bearing accounts at the Bank of Greece were raided. These included most of the State’s regional hospital budgets, various universities and (it is alleged) at least one utility company.
The shortfalls came to light late last week and this morning as various hospital purchasing cheques in particular began to bounce. The monies – estimated by one source to total some 1.4 billion euros – appear to have been used to pay off the tiny minority of private sovereign creditors who, under the original terms of their bond purchase, were entitled come what may to full payment of the bond’s yield entitlement.
Setting aside the amoral audacity of this act, it does yet again raise the issue of a Greece so utterly lacking in any real funds in the real world, that to pay off a minute proportion of the bondholders it had to resort to such a desperate measure.
“The Greek government used this money in order to purchase government bonds from various bondholders without getting permission from the bank account owners,” one reliable Athens source told The Slog in commenting on the story, “hospitals and universities have been robbed of hundreds of millions of Euros, absolutely essential for their core functionality.”
On being pointed at the Health News site, The Slog immediately contacted another of many Athens sources who have flocked to this website in recent weeks. This informant in turn offered access to a senior administrator in a major teaching hospital. The person thus contacted told me: “There can be no doubt about this. It isn’t even very subtle. All the monies were withdrawn over a brief period of time on March 8th after normal banking hours. I have spoken to teaching contacts at Universities over the weekend, and it has been confirmed that they too have the same embarrassment. These people are criminals who should be brought to justice. But in the Greece of today, it will not happen”.
One final source told me shortly before posting, “The Bank of Greece is naked in this matter. We ask them for the reasons why this has happened, and they claim to have no knowledge of such things. This is ridiculous. This could not have been done without their cooperation. There is nobody now in Greece we can trust”.
Equally, nobody should be surprised that senior politicians and government officials have conspired to do such a thing. The Venizelos elite has shown itself to be without ethics or remorse in many ways already. The European Central Bank, Brussels, the IMF and even Berlin have also shown a compliant willingness to look the other way or simply ignore the Law if it suits them so to do. But now, I think institutions around the world – and their stakeholders – need to look at what’s happening in southern Europe and ask themselves, ‘Is this really right? Is any cause worth this amount of depravity and deprivation?’
Footnote: sharp-eyed Sloggers may have noticed that last Friday – that ill-starred March 23rd – the Greeks once again postponed the time by which English Law bondholders have to participate in psi. The reason: they aren’t going to participate, and Athens does NOT have the money to pay them…as the above post demonstrates rather well.
We are waiting for the axe to fall.
I do not expect the government of Greece to survive the next election.
I do not expect the Euro to long survive the Greek government.
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