That gives me trucking e-log vibes. The few big players who are already doing "the thing" use their control of the industry to force it on everyone else because it handicaps everyone who is at a scale that's too small for "the thing" to be cost effective.
The beauty of the current system is that because everyone has been told they are free, it is their own fault when they get trapped in a debt cycle.
Thus their own moral sense is the jailor.
If the farmer has a shit year, the lender has a variety of options for recourse. Including dispossessing the farmer of land. Historically there were other options like selling one's family. You could castrate yourself and hope to God you'll be accepted into court. Debtor's prison I imagine is also a probable consequence. This is doubly offensive when we consider interest, which can often result in multiples of the initial investment, and that many large scale first world lenders have developed world and the IMF backing them basically indicating they're not allowed default.
Hard to say with the information provided, but it seems typical of the trend.
Much of modern transactional banking and securities law became settled during that period, eventually becoming nearly universal across disparate legal regimes around the world.
It describes changes that happened in war, mining, shipping, trade in (mostly western) Europe in the last decades of XV century. The common theme is finance and it includes a chapter on how bank houses became bigger and could secure much bigger loans (which allowed bigger states to wage wars, or rich individuals to bid for top titles ;)).
Fun read.
One learns every day :) I will be more careful about this when writing centuries in English the next time.
Also this poster on quora have a detailed list https://www.quora.com/Why-do-we-write-century-numbers-with-I...
https://bigthink.com/culture-religion/how-the-medici-family-...
When someone borrows against cheese they are borrowing against existing personal property for which labor has already been supplied rather than borrowing against future earnings. The lender does not need to verify income and credit, just inspect the purity of the cheese. With a home loan, the owner is borrowing against the personal property in the building, as well as the common property in the land and the future earnings of other people such as their tenants.
Additionally in the case of a co-op, the interest charges the organization collects on the debt are usually reinvested locally for the benefit members.
Most of the stuff in my living room, for example, would not be able to secure a loan, except maybe a pawn loan on undesirable terms.
And it’s really weird to look at credit cards as an example of the same thing. “Your ability to earn and repay” is not generally classified as an “asset” except maybe metaphorically — not a financial/accounting sense.
You can also sign up for classes where you watch them crack a wheel and then do a sample of various cheese flavors.
It is interesting to find out more about the production side of these wheels. Thank you!
On an overseas store shelf the alternative is between real Parmigiano-Reggiano (if the experimentation is successful, with a chip) and counterfeit shit, not between different cheesemakers of the consortium (who, if they care, adopt their own trademarks and branding for particularly good cheese at premium prices).
On my overseas store shelf I have a choice between 3-5 different brands of real Parmigiano-Reggiano, with the most expensive one being twice the price of the cheapest one, so there is obviously some competition going on. The only other real competitor is Grana Padano, which most people consider a cheaper substitute.
Of course one or more of those brands claiming to be Parmigiano-Reggiano might very well be fake and I'd have no way of knowing.
The "protected designation of origin" is essentially a trademark that helps ensure that if you buy something marked "Parmigiano Reggiano" or "Parmesan", it's going to be cheese done using specific recipe, coming from its traditional, original region. It doesn't stop you from using the same recipe elsewhere, it just means you can't sell it as being the same. PDOs are generally used to protect local traditional products, though politics can get a bit cutthroat about it (I recall some... hot discussions regarding PDO for vodka)
Another fun fact, most cheesemakers are farmer coops and act as a sort of bank for the farmers. Most of them can borrow against their "share" of the cheese that is aging if they have a big capital expense that it coming up and they can't wait 2-3 years for the cheese to age and sell.