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By
Julian Gough
"Ibrahim Bihi," he said, extending his right hand. "Dr.
Ibrahim Bihi. I am Somali. Oh, it is a long story."
"Jude O'Reilly," I said, extending mine. We shook. "Please,
tell the story. I like stories."
"Very well, if you are sure... "
He cleared his throat, and began.
"I eked a meagre living, exploiting a fundamental structural
discrepancy in the price of Goats." He looked me in
the eye.
I nodded. "You've lost me," I said.
"I must apologise," he said. "My degree is in economics,
and it has had an unfortunate effect on my conversational
English. Allow me to begin again..." He composed himself.
"My story is a sorry tale, of the Dismal Science, in
the heart of the Dark Continent..."
"Lost me," I said, nodding.
"A story. Of Economics. In Africa."
"Ah, grand. I have you now," I said, entirely gratified
by this excellent clarification. I'd known he had it
in him, if he simply made the effort. "Now we're sucking
diesel! Sound man. On you go."
He recomposed himself and, after a pause, continued.
"After the final collapse of the Somali state, the confiscation
of my property, the destruction of my possessions and
my repeated relocation due to the toing and froing of
multiple overlapping civil wars, I eventually found
myself in Hargeisa, owning only a goat."
"What was she called?"
"Who?"
"The Goat."
"She was a goat. She didn't have a name."
"I find it hard to follow a story without a name," I
said. "It is a weakness in me."
"Call her anything you like."
"Can I call her Ethel?" I said, for I had a fondness
for the name, it being the name of the unmarried sister
of the Orphanage Cook. Ethel gave us all a bag of Emerald
sweets to share every Christmas. Thus, every third year
I got one and, by rationing my consumption of it to
a judicious lick at bedtime, could usually make it last
till the taking down of the decorations on January 6th,
or a little later. The sweet wrapper itself, stored
under my pillow, often maintained a trace of coconutty,
chocolatey fragrance till March.
"Feel free to think of the goat as Ethel."
"Thank you." I closed my eyes. Ethel the Goat shimmered
and came into hard focus, replacing the faint, nebulous,
nameless goat Ibrahim Bihi had originally introduced.
Ethel chewed meditatively, and tilted her head to one
side, looking at me unblinking.
Opening my eyes again, I urged him to continue.
He continued. "The forced sale of a goat in wartime
is unlikely to realise the full value of the goat."
I mentally substituted the word "Ethel" for the terms
"a goat" and "the goat", and the meaning became entirely
clear. I closed my eyes and smiled fondly at Ethel,
as he continued.
"Alternatively, the slaughter and personal consumption
of the goat, while keeping one alive in the short term,
would lead in the medium term to having no goat, and
no money. In the long term, with neither assets nor
capital nor cashflow, death would inevitably ensue.
Luckily, my PhD had been devoted to aspects of arbitrage;
the exploitation of price discrepancies in imperfect
markets. I thus resolved to apply my knowledge of temporary
market inefficiencies to my Goat."
He thus resolved to apply his knowledge of temporary
market inefficiencies to Ethel, I said under my breath.
"This final, or ultimate, goat, on which all my hopes
rested, had only three legs, due to shrapnel from a
mine stepped on some weeks previously by my second-last,
or penultimate, goat, on the trek to Hargeisa."
Hastily naming the penultimate goat Charles, I exploded
it immediately before I could bond with it, and removed
Ethel's rear left leg.
"Thus the surviving goat's movements were slow, and
my search for arbitrage opportunities was limited to
the immediate vicinity of Hargeisa airport, where I
was sleeping at the side of the runway, for the UN presence
at the airport made it a safer place for the homeless,
friendless wanderer than in the lawless town proper."
I remembered seeing a postcard of Knock airport sent
to Brother Patrocles by Monsignor James Horan to congratulate
the orphanage on winning the Harty Cup. I imagined Knock
airport, removed the drizzle, clouds and fog, drained
the bog, covered it in sand, and increased the temperature
by 20 degrees. As an afterthought, I mentally located,
just over the horizon, all the stories I had heard the
older orphans tell of Limerick City, including the one
about the lad getting stabbed in the head with a screwdriver,
the one about the 10-year-old in the bus station toilets,
and how Aengus McMahon smuggled the bar stool out of
Driscoll's after the Microdisney gig.
"I thought long," he continued. "I thought hard. I ate
the final remnants of my penultimate goat, which I had
cured in salt and carried on the frail back of my ultimate
goat to Hargeisa. I came up with a plan. The next day,
I ate the mutilated fourth leg of my ultimate goat,
as I refined the plan. I wiped my mouth as I finished,
and drew a deep breath. It was now, or never. I had
neither friend, nor relative, nor roof, nor occupation:
I had, in all this world, one solitary three-legged
goat. This poor goat, which I had come to love: its
hazel eyes: its trim beard: its dry dugs: this poor
beast comprised all the Surplus Value I possessed. It
was the Rock of Capital on which I stood, raised above
the perilous sea in which so many of my countrymen around
me desperately swam or, ceasing their struggles, drowned."
In life, in front of me, Dr. Ibrahim Bihi closed his
eyes and drew a deep breath, perhaps in unconscious
echo, or memory. His voice began again, filled with
a strengthening passion.
"That poor goat was my stepping-stone to a safer world,
a better world, some greater island raised higher above
the perilous waves of Life. My first stepping-stone
to the Capitals of Capital: to London, Tokyo, New York,
thrusting so far above the sea of subsistence that the
people there think the world dry land, so that their
inhabitants till recently flew from great Island to
great Island far above the sea of suffering, never looking
down. Some glanced perhaps out the windows of their
planes: but if they saw us they must have thought us
waving, not drowning, for they did not come to save
us. They did not come. I believe some troops arrived
in Mogadishu. Eighteen died: they went home. A million
of us not worth 18 of them. A million, not worth 18.
America, who built her wealth upon the surplus labour
of 20m African slaves. There was no Marshall Plan for
Africa."
"What happened to Ethel the goat?" I said, somewhat
appalled that he appeared to have forgotten her plight.
In my mind's eye, she teetered bravely on her three
legs, yet still stood proudly erect, the hint of a tear
in her hazel eye.
"Hmm? Oh." Dr. Bihi opened his eyes. "I waited until
the daily UN food plane was committed to its final approach:
as its wheels touched down at the far end of the dusty
runway and I saw the puffs of dust, I drove my goat
out of the long grass and into the middle of the runway
and, leaving her standing bewildered and blindfold where
the tyre-tracks were thickest, I ran back into the long
grass. The plane was laden, the suspension heavy, the
engines slung low: the propeller took her head off and
the headless corpse went under the wheels."
"Oh no," I said, wishing now that I had not visualised
Ethel quite so intensely.
"Oh yes," he said. "I went straight to the control tower
and demanded to see the airport manager. In Somalia,
it is the custom to pay a man double the market price
if you accidentally kill his beast. I had the price
of two goats in my hand before the plane had finished
taxiing back to the terminal."
"What luck!" I cried. "What did you do with the money?"
"I went to the market, of course, and bought two goats."
"They could be friends to each other," I said, pleased.
"The next day I drove the two goats into the path of
a Gulfstream jet from Riadah."
"Ah!" First upon my fingers and then in the quiet caverns
of my mind I extrapolated from one to two: from two
to four: from four to eight: and so on for some time.
"And thus," I said after a while, "You quickly became
infinitely wealthy."
"Sadly, no," he sighed. "It is the tragedy of arbitrage
opportunities: they are killed by those who love them.
The Market abhors a price discrepancy... But oh, it
is beautiful to watch the market corrected by the invisible
hand! The success of my scheme was noted by others:
by the third day, rivals were driving goats on to the
runway ahead of me. Our competition in the market that
afternoon drove up the price of goats. Thus, the market
price of two goats, pjaid to us that morning at the
airport for each one of our slaughtered goats, was by
that afternoon unable to buy us two goats in the market.
Goat hyperinflation had set in, for at the airport the
next morning we demanded double the new market price
for the goats we drove into the path of an old Aeroflot
Tu-144. The airport manager agreed the new rate of compensation.
Thus, the compensation now being indexed to the market
price of the goat, where the price of the goat is n
and the compensation is 2n, capital was in effect free:
no matter how high the goat price soared, the fresh
capital for the next round of goat finance soared along
with it. The tap was held artificially open, and a speculative
bubble made inevitable.
"However, soon the doubled and redoubled prices paid
out by the airport manager had reached such giddy heights
that the merchant class grew greedy and joined in. No
other asset could offer so high a rate of return as
the goat, so capital was now diverted into goats and
out of every other asset class, and all but the goat
traders were starved of investment. Men sold their very
houses to raise the price of a single goat.
"Word had spread, and men drove goats in any condition
to Hargeisa from all over Somaliland, and even the other
statelets of the fragmented Somalia: from Puntland,
from Middle Shabelle and Lower Jubba in the chaotic
southern rump state, even from Ethiopia. The market
was soon flooded with goats, many of them sick or lame.
However, this did not matter, for the demand for goats
had become infinite. The runway, being entirely unprotected
around its perimeter on either side, was the Platonic
ideal of a free market: there were no barriers to entry.
"However, planes were by now reluctant to land in Hargeisa."
Wishing to pull my weight in the conversation, I ventured,
"Too many goats on the runway?"
Ibrahim Bihi shook his head. "The goats were not the
problem. Certain economic firebrands, frozen out of
the goat market, had attempted to introduce the cow
as an element of trade at the airport's morning meetings."
"Ah," I said.
"The goat cartel fought this fiercely, as it endangered
their near monopoly, and threatened an uncontrolled,
overnight devaluation of the goat which could badly
shake confidence in the market. Also, the pilots were
very unhappy. More importantly, the UN, as issuers of
fresh capital and guarantors of the liquidity of the
market, opposed the introduction of the cow. Any decent
sized aircraft could plough through almost unlimited
numbers of the lightweight native Somali goat without
risking much more than a puncture from a shattered pelvis
or horn, but a couple of cows could take the undercarriage
off a passenger plane. The replacement cost of an aircraft
dwarfed even the inflated cost of the goats, and the
UN made an informal deal that if we kept the cows off
the runway, they would continue to pay out for the goats.
"That was good?" I ventured.
Dr Ibrahim Bihi nodded. "Of course, some fiscal conservatives
within the UN wished unilaterally to halt the goat payments
entirely. It was, however, too late to do this, as an
enormous re-allocation of capital had already occurred,
and the personal wealth of the entire Hargeisa middle
class, and indeed that of many enterprising UN employees
and most of the pilots and crews flying the route, was
by now tied up in goats. To abolish the payments would
have led to a collapse in market confidence, the panicked
sale of goats, a flooded goat market and subsequent
price collapses that would have ruined most.
"As you can see, we had entered a classic momentum market,
where the price of the goat had decoupled from the fundamental
value of the goat: the cost of a goat now vastly exceeded
the capital returns which were possible over its lifetime
from sale of milk, cheese, and, ultimately, meat and
skin. However, vast fortunes can still be made in strong
momentum markets, regardless of fundamental values,
as long as you are not the one left holding the goat
when the reversion to fundamental value occurs. And
so I stayed in the market, fully invested in goats.
"By this time the goat craze had become a mania. A severe
shortage of goats, and infinite demand, led to excesses.
The price of goats became ludicrous, and many animals
were led to the town market which were loudly proclaimed
to be goats but which on closer inspection proved to
be dogs, dressed up. They were purchased anyway, the
frightful animals, at grotesque prices.
"The sheer length of the boom was now leading to increased
confidence. There was a loosening in credit. It seemed
madness not to lend to a man who could pay you back
handsomely the next day. And as a creditor, once you'd
borrowed and repaid with interest a couple of times,
the banks began to persuade you to borrow more.
"Soon the shortage of actual goats led to a booming
market in goat futures, goat options and increasingly
arcane goat derivative products. This trade in young,
unborn, and even theoretical goats allowed yet more
money into a market whose only bottleneck or brake up
to this time had been the physical shortage of actual
goats.
"So crucial to the economy were goats now, and so fatal
to our people any collapse in the goat market, that
the UN appointed a Unicef Official with Special Responsibility
For Goats. Around him swiftly sprung up a bureaucracy.
A well-meaning man, his attempts to stabilise the goat
market were well-intentioned. However, this intervention
by the authorities was, as ever, late and ineffectual,
indeed, counterproductive. Reassured that the UN wouldn't
let the market collapse, prices soared higher. It had
become a one-way bet.
"The Airport Manager had by now begun to fly in goats,
to sell at market for nearly twice what he was paying
out, thus financing further imports. This meant both
more goats and more planes arriving to run them over.
Now that everybody was benefiting there seemed no need
for the boom ever to end. True, the Unicef budget for
Somalia was paying out increasingly large compensation
fees to the owners of dead goats, but one of the first
moves by the Unicef Official with Special Responsibility
For Goats was to make the goat compensation fund self-funding
by hedging much of it in goat futures. Now, every time
Unicef pushed up the price of goats by paying out double
the market price, it regained the money fourfold, as
its goat futures contracts soared in value.
"The only drawback was that the slaughter on the runways
each day was by now so great that it was becoming a
hazard to land, and it could take till nightfall to
execute the day's quota of goats, with planes forced
to slaughter animals all the way down the runway, then
often all the way back again, to hit the ones they'd
missed and to finish off the wounded, and then again
all along the taxi-route back to the terminal. Takeoffs
were being delayed while the bodies were removed from
the runways, which lowered the number of flights and
thus the potential revenues generated for all. This
was solved by bringing in an electronic Goat Accident
and Compensatory System to replace the cumbersome physical
system. Now, instead of herding your one, then two,
then four, then eight, then 16 goats on to the runway
each afternoon, each of which then needed to go through
the labourious process of being hit by a landing aircraft's
undercarriage, wingtip or propeller, you simply input
your goat numbers into the GACS. The airport manager
input all the flights due in that day, each flight was
allocated its goats, and the compensation due each trader
came up on the Big Screen.
"Some missed the blood-soaked runway of the old system,
the shouts of the traders, the roar of the engines and
the shriek of the goats, but all acknowledged the increased
efficiency of the new system. Often two full trade cycles
could be executed in a day, doubling turnover. By the
end of the year, Hargeisa contained 14,000 millionaires
and Unicef were running a paper profit of over a trillion
dollars." He sighed.
"Then what happened?" I said.
A curious sorrow seemed to fill him. "Now that we were
trading virtual goats, a peculiar lassitude began to
sweep through the trading classes. Oh, certainly, paupers
were becoming millionaires, and millionaires were soon
billionaires by merely getting out of bed and showing
their faces at the beautiful new Goat Exchange, but
the heady joy of the early days had gone. Of course,
by now, the volume of theoretical goats being traded
was so vast that they outstripped the world's population
of actual goats. Should too many traders simultaneously
seek to see their actual goats, there would not be enough:
and a run on goats at the Central Goat Market could
cause panic, and disaster.
It was reluctantly decided to take our currency off
the Goat Standard, so that however rich we grew, we
had no automatic right to exchange our wealth at the
Central Goat Market for a physical Goat. The Goat was
made mere Flesh, as Gold had been reduced to mere metal
after the fall of Bretton Woods."
"Ah," I said non-committally. The name Bretton Woods
rang a vague bell. American name. A golfer? I nodded
my understanding. Dr. Ibrahim Bihi continued.
"A physical goat was now a mere historical curiosity:
the vast new electronic Goat Exchange had replaced the
old, dung-stinking Central Goat Market, from which the
few surviving obsolete goats were released to wander
where they would. Trade grew lethargic. It was no longer
necessary to get out of bed. Billionaires became trillionaires
by merely phoning in their figures to GACS. Yet the
millionaires envied the Billionaires: While the Trillionaires
feared the millionaires. Trade became vicious yet meaningless.
Everyone was growing richer, yet somehow more anxious.
Without a solid goat to give value to the figure, one's
wealth only had meaning in relation to another's wealth,
and was thus never enough. Someone, somewhere, always
had another zero. On the day I became a billionaire,
I felt poorer than when I had owned but a single goat.
What could you do but trade more, trade harder? The
social anxiety and sense of failure felt by the millionaires
and billionaires in a city of trillionaires caused despair,
self-harm, even suicide.
"Trade went on all night now: men hardly slept, or saw
their wives or families. They spoke of nothing but goats,
yet had soon forgotten what the word goat had once referred
to: many younger traders had never seen a goat.
"Yet the new wealth was meritocratic: old money, in
property or cocoa, or oil, was easily overtaken by that
of young, brash goat traders who better understood these
new rules.
"Confused by all I had wrought, and by now so rich that
there was no word in common use that could describe
my wealth, I returned one day to the old Hargeisa airport
runway, the site of my glorious notion. It was disused
now, of course, for our wealthy nation had outgrown
the source of its wealth. The transport of goats was
no longer necessary, and we no longer needed aid. Our
luxury goods arrived through the new, modern airport
and electronic Goat Exchange on the far side of Hargeisa.
"The long grass had spread from both edges to reclaim
the old runway. And there I found, munching quietly,
disregarded in the long grass of the abandoned airfield,
two goats."
Nell and Mick, I thought to myself, and saw them clear
as day before me. Though grumpy (I thought), they love
each other. Mick nuzzled Nell. Nell kicked him.
"And what happened then?" I asked, as Mick mounted Nell
in my mind.
Dr. Ibrahim Bihi sighed. "While I stared at the two
goats I received a frantic call from my office: the
bottom had fallen out of it, and we had all lost everything.
But who could have predicted that?"
"Who, indeed?" I said.
"The dream had ended, and it all went away. The luxuries,
the money, the gleaming towers of steel and glass. The
people lost faith in the system: good companies followed
bad into ruin, for it turned out that those not trading
goats had yet been corrupted by them. Envious of our
billions, they had fiddled the figures and diddled the
books. Now all that had seemed sane behaviour in the
long dream of the bubble looked criminal madness in
the cold light of day. Heroes of the goat market were
fired, divorced, jailed for the very ambition and creativity
that had made them heroes. All fell apart. The delicate
fabric of society unravelled. Somaliland lay again in
ruins. I again had nothing. It was as though it had
never been... I cut a stout stick from the bushes, and
slept at the edge of the runway to escape my hostile
creditors, investigators, prosecutors."
"What did you do then?" I asked. "Poor, alone, and friendless,
again, in poor Somaliland?"
"I had learned my lesson. I had heard that the US were
conducting tank exercises, across the border in Djibouti.
In Djibouti," said Dr. Ibrahim Bihi, "it is the custom
to pay a man triple the market price if you accidentally
kill his beast. I raised my stout stick, and drove my
two goats North, before me, through the minefields.
But that is another story."
Unregarded, it had begun to snow.
"Please," I said. "Tell me the story. I like stories."
In my mind, Mick got off Nell. Yes, in spring, there
would be a little kid goat.
"Very well," said Dr. Ibrahim Bihi, and cleared his
throat.
I closed my eyes, as the first flakes fell. Yes. I would
call her Ethel.
Julian Gough grew up in London, Tipperary and Galway.
He sings and writes lyrics for the obscure underground
band, Toasted Heretic, and has a degree in philosophy
and English. He is executive producer of the feature-length
documentary "The Life And Crimes Of Citizen Ming", to
be released in early 2003. His first novel, Juno & Juliet
is published by Flamingo/HarperCollins in the UK and
Anchor/Random House in the US.
"The Great Hargeisa Goat Bubble" is taken from his second
novel
Posted to the web by: M.Cali-Khayre (Holland)
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