With the Sensex scaling new heights today and India’s real estate in a boom, someone forwarded an email today. It contained this absolutely hilarious story about markets and bubbles. Some excerpts:

“I eked a meagre living, exploiting a fundamental structural discrepancy in the price of Goats.” He looked me in the eye.

“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.

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.

A must read: The Great Hargeisa Goat Bubble