In AGOT it is mentioned that part of the crown’s debt is to several Tyroshi trading cartels. What are those and how old is the word cartel itself anyway?

A cartel is a group of economic actors – either sellers or buyers – who agree to cooperate in an attempt to create an oligopoly that can fix supply and/or demand (and thus prices), market share, and so forth. A trading cabal would probably be focused on trying to control a geographic market, or on trying to corner a given commodity.

In terms of its origin, the use of “cartel” with regards to business dates back to the late 19th century, where it was used in Germany to describe business organization in the new industries (whereas in the Anglo-American sphere, the terms “trust” or “combination” predominated).

Where is Littlefinger spending all the money he is embezzling, that his lands are a pile rocks with one guard, 23 sheep, and seaweed for breakfast? He can’t afford, i don’t know, a better house, or maybe some more sheep? Actual food?

I’d recommend reading “Who Stole Westeros?” to find out more of my thoughts on this, but…

The short version is that Littlefinger is using his money to buy ships, urban real estate, lending money at interest, speculating in commodities markets, and acting as your classic putting-out merchant type with an eye to vertical integration.

If you’re asking why he doesn’t have more land (other than the lands of Harrenhal, which are quite extensive if slightly cursed), it’s that Westeros doesn’t have a free market in land, wherein land becomes a fungible commodity that can be bought and sold at will and abstracted into derivatives and futures, etc.

Land in Westeros is distributed through feudal relationships that are traditional and customary in nature – fiefdoms are hereditary, taxation and rent levels are fixed, and tenancies are more likely to involve feudal obligations than pure cash rents.

What would a mug of ale or a roast chicken cost in a medieval tavern/inn? How accurate is fantasy when it represents taverns? Are there examples of things like menus or prices and how would they match up to westeros?

The main inaccuracy in fantasy is A. how many of them serve food or have rooms to let and B. how many of them there are compared to places that just serve liquor.

Historically speaking, because there was much less travel in the (especially in the early) Middle Ages than in later periods, there were far fewer establishments that catered to travelers, unless you were on a major trade route or pilgrimage or the like. So what you had was a lot of taverns that just sold alcohol and nothing else, because people were expected to eat at home, and people were expected to sleep at home, and pilgrims were expected to find lodging in monasteries.

As we get to the High and Late Middle Ages, more and more people were traveling for business and other secular purposes, and the number of pilgrims had outstripped the supply of beds in monasteries. There was more demand for more services, so you started to see inns (as opposed to taverns) popping up that provided rooms to let, and those places tended to serve food to travelers.

So to focus your question on prices for booze…in the 14th century, ale ran about 1 to 2 pence a gallon. Converting that to dragons works out to about 1.3 silver stags to the gallon in Westeros.

Why do you think the lords of the Vale arte so poor?!

I think there’s a couple reasons:

there’s a sharp division between the lords of the Vale proper and the lords of the Fingers and the islands. The former have all the rich farmland and arable land of the valley, whereas the latter have less and poorer soil that’s much more mountainous. So there’s a lot of inequality within the nobility: consider the difference between Petyr Baelish’s father and the Royces of Runestone, for example.
the lords of the Vale are traditionalists, even more than most. They don’t act in a profit-maximizing fashion, they concentrate on agriculture rather than trade (hence why Gulltown is so small), and they would never think of economic development (hence why the mineral resources of the mountains haven’t been tapped into as in the Westerlands).
when you get down to it, the Vale is not that big. It’s quite fertile, but it’s not as big as the Reach and it’s not going to grow any time soon. This means that the Vale can’t expand its economy easily just by bringing new land under the plow (because all the land that can be grown on already has been) or by increasing the number of hands in a field (because that threatens overpopulation).

Steven Xue Asks: Do lords normally sell food right before winter?

I did a reread of the Alynne spoiler chapter and I find the way the lords of the Vale are trying to sell off their gain reserves and doing it so eagerly as lord Grafton says “the lords are eager to sell” very baffling because winter is fast approaching. I find this really bizarre because I’ve always been under the impression that before the 19^th century, people had a tendency to stock up on food supplies before winter to ensure they had enough food to last the winter months.

In Westeros where winter can last for many years, I would have thought that right now the conservation of food would be considered a huge prerogative for both the nobility and the smallfolk (who should know that winter is just right around the corner). I suppose these lords are just trying to make a quick buck while the going is good, but even from a monetary standpoint it doesn’t make a lot of sense as Littlefinger points out that when winter is in full swing, he will then be able to sell their grain back to them at a higher rate.

With all this in mind I’m just wondering if it makes any sense at all for the lords of the Vale to be selling off their grain reserves right before winter and did this actually happen in real life?

I would disagree with “winter is fast approaching.” Autumn may be lingering in the fields of the Vale, but Jaime has seen snow falling in the Riverlands, which means winter is here.

And the lords of the Vale want to sell their food now because that’s what they (and the Reach) have historically done: exported their surplus so that the rest of Westeros can eat. While they’ll make a substantial profit due to higher prices – which is a significant source of their wealth and power – they wouldn’t dream of holding back supply from the market to maximize profit.

That would violate the honor code of noblesse oblige, their reciprocal obligation to their smallfolk. It would be precisely the kind of selfish and materialist action that marks one out as a merchant rather than a nobleman, who acts in a disinterested fashion.

What Littlefinger is doing is known as “Engrossing, forestalling and regrating.” He’s withholding goods from market and buying up other supplies to resell later, with the intended purpose of raising prices. And historically, this kind of monopolistic behavior was considered highly illegal, because creating artificial scarcities threatened social disorder (bread riots).

What is the difference between tax farming and collecting rents in the context of Westeros? Like for the smallfolk in the Crownlands, would I deal with a tax collector (to pay taxes to the king) and an overseer (if I live on lands owned by the king)? What about in other regions? Sorry if this is a really silly question or if I am misunderstanding something. My English is not the best.

There’s quite a few differences.

Who you pay: in traditional feudal taxes and rent, you’re paying to the lord of the fief, who is bound by recriprocal feudal obligations, the custom of noblesse oblige, and a certain long-term interest in keeping his tenants a going concern. With tax–farming, you’re dealing with a middleman who is bound by nothing and has no long-term interests at all, since tax-farming contracts are usually strictly time-limited.
How much you pay: traditional feudal taxes and rents were fixed by custom and law, and usually recorded as well. While this had the effect of making past injustices very hard to shift, it also meant stability and predictability. Tax-farmers, by contrast, paid for their contract through an auction process, were looking to turn a profit on their investment, and could impose whatever rates they wanted to – which meant higher rates and substantial unpredictability.
What you pay: a lot of feudal taxes and rents were either in kind or in the form of labor, which is handy when you’re a farmer who has lots of agricultural produce but not much cash on hand. Tax-farmers are far less interested in going through the messy process of storing and selling these goods, and tend to want cash on hand, which is not good for farmers.

There’s also an issue of sub-infeudation – i.e, the layering of land ownership from king down to lord to lesser lord to knight to peasant. So normally in the Crownlands you would pay your rent and your taxes to your local knight or lord, and then they’d pay their feudal taxes to their liege lord, who pays their taxes to the lord of the principle house, who pays their taxes to the king.

If you lived on the King’s own land as opposed to lands that he gives out as fiefs to the various lords of the Crownlands, you have a simplified system where you pay your taxes and rents directly to the King as your liege lord. Unless the king sells the right to collect to some tax farmer…

How much money/valuables each kingdom produce annualy? As in a lord paramount’s yearly budget, and what they could save up every average year, since winter years are probs sinkholes moneywise and in the north I can even see complete economic halt. The russian tzars wealth came in huge parts from the fur of Siberia, erratic winters should make it even more valuable, no?

I estimate that the GDI of Westeros is somewhere around 525 million dragons a year. Dividing that by the population of the Seven Kingdoms, you get an extremely rough estimate of something like:

the North: GDI of 46 million a year.
the Vale: GDI of 40 million a year.
Dorne: GDI of 20 million a year.
the Crownlands: GDI of 20 million a year.
the Stormlands: GDI of 33 million a year.
the Westerlands: GDI of 59 million a year.
the Reach: GDI of 131 million a year.
Iron Islands: GDI of 13-20 million a year.
the Riverlands: GDI of 26-57 million a year.

Now, these are very crude breakdowns of national GDI by population, which leaves out that these regions have very different rates of GDI per capita. The North should be somewhat lower than its numbers suggest due to the poorer quality of the soil and the toll of the winters, Dorne somewhat richer due to its high-quality textiles, the Westerlands much much more due to their gold and their industry, and the Riverlands is a big question mark given that it’s population and army size don’t really match up.

Could you give a guesstimate of the incomes of the 7 Great Houses in a single year? Which do you think is the poorest of the Great Houses?

Well, I did some guesstimates of the nobility here. I did some guesstimates on House Lannister’s income here and here.

The Great Houses probably all have incomes in the hundreds of thousands, given how much land they’re drawing taxes from, peaking at House Lannister’s million a year in gold.

In terms of a relative ranking of incomes, I’d say

Tier 1: Lannisters ≥ Tyrells. Obviously, this depends on agricultural prices at the time, and arguably demand for gold as well.

Tier 2: Arryns. The Vale is noted to be as equally fertile as the Reach, if not as big, and they’ve got a significant presence in Narrow Sea trade.

Tier 3: Starks, Baratheons, and Martells? Here’s where things get really hard to figure out. The North is immense, but not the most populated and the soil isn’t the best. However, it’s still arable land, and more importantly the Starks have access to valuable commodities – timber, wool, and silver. Likewise, much of Dorne isn’t arable and therefore the population isn’t very high, but the Dornish do export wines, niche agricultural commodities (peppers, citrus fruits, olive oil), and silks and satins. So I’d probably put the Martells ahead of the Starks, but I’m not sure whether it’s a tier’s worth of difference. The Baratheons probably fall somewhere in the middle – their land is a lot more productive, but they have a relatively small amount of it after the loss of the Crownlands, although they do have amber to sell (not sure how big of a market that is, tho).

Tier 3.5: Tullys. This is almost entirely a product of political disorganization. The Riverlands are large, incredibly fertile, and draw a lot of trade due to their central location. However, the Riverlands are not well-developed: they don’t have any cities, their road network could be much more developed, they need more bridges, and it’s absolutely criminal that no one’s built a canal linking the Blue Fork to Ironman’s Bay to boost trade. Likewise, I don’t think the Tullys are as good at getting taxes out of their nobles as the other Great Houses, so there’s a lot of wealth in the Riverlands that doesn’t make it to Riverrun. If the Riverlands were better organized, I’d put them easily in Tier 2.

Tier 4: The Greyjoys. The Ironborn have the smallest population and the poorest productivity of soil. Trade is diminished by the Ironborn’s hatred of “the gold price,” and the fact that iron isn’t that great a commodity to trade. Contrary to what you might think, piracy isn’t that great an income-generator: at best, you’re grabbing a percentage of the trade everyone else is making, it’s high-risk and income is intermittent, etc.

Is Cersei’s “Golden Bank of Lannisport” notion really a good idea? From the text is always assumed it was another silly, unattainable pipe dream like her thought about building a new castle across the river???

It’s an incredibly good idea. Casterly Rock has an enormous, enormous amount of gold that’s sitting in the vaults not doing anything or at most being used for the Lannister war machine and nonproductive political loans. If you turn it into the liquid reserves of a bank, through the magic of fractional reserve banking, you can create many, many times more money than is in the Rock while still retaining a fairly conservative reserve rate (i.e, what percent of your reserves aren’t lent out so that they’re on hand to pay depositors who want to access their money).

The Lannisters lent 3 million gold to Robert Baratheon without blinking, paid off Jaehaerys II’s war debts without breaking a sweat. Their yearly income is at least a million a year, given how much they gave to Robert on a yearly basis. Forbes thinks that they have around 2.1 million gold in the Rock; I’ve seen estimates of up to 200 million gold. As a max figure, based on 6,000 years of earning a million a year (not considering any interest), they may have around 6 billion gold dragons in the vaults of the Rock.

So let’s take an average of these estimates and say they have 2 billion gold saved up. To begin with, that 2 billion equates to 380% of Westeros’ GDP. If they lent it out at a relatively conservative 10% reserve rate, they’d generate 20 billion in deposits and 17 billion in loans. In other words, just by putting the money into circulation instead of sticking it under a big rock, the Westerosi economy would grow by almost 4,000%.