France Butter Shortage
30th October 2017
News coverage of the shortage of butter on French supermarket shelves (BBC, Bloomberg, NYT) is an economics lesson in itself.
As usual, when there’s a “shortage,” some sort of government intervention in the free market is nearby: the end of “milk quotas” in the European Union in 2015. I can see someone arguing that the cause of the shortage wasn’t the quotas but the repeal of them, but that seems like a stretch.