Goats are everywhere in Malawi. With a population exceeding 10 million as of 2024 and growing, they will surely overtake the human adult population of 12 million soon if they haven’t already. As a visitor leaving the international airport you will find them grazing at their leisure as far as the eye can see, and you’ll dodge them as they dash across the road or lie in the middle of it being torn to shreds by crows.

While goat milk is seldom consumed—the meat is a luxury reserved for special occasions and goat cheese is basically unknown—the goats of Malawi perform a much more essential function. They offer a store of value, accessible even to the poorest, a portable savings technology that outperforms all others.

In a country where the official inflation rate averaged 28.1 percent over the past year but the central bank caps the interest rate on savings at 4.3 percent, the currency devalues suddenly overnight (most recently by 44 percent in November 2023) and stocks, bonds, and real estate are inaccessible to the majority, goats truly live up to their name as the Greatest Of All Time (GOAT). A few years ago, they sold for 15,000 Malawi Kwacha (MWK) but now fetch north of 100,000 MWK. They are perhaps the closest thing we have to challenging Michael Saylor’s Bitcoin thesis that there is no second best. Because if Malawi’s central bank devalues significantly again (and it is surely only a matter of time) without putting the brakes on the 44.4 percent annual money supply growth, the goat will surely enter price discovery.

But this store of value is rapidly destroying all value.

During the maize-growing season between late December and late March, you would observe the goats being shepherded in an orderly fashion and corralled. Maize is the staple food of Malawians and is mostly grown during this single season, the rainy season. If the crop fails, it means widespread hunger. And everyone knows that goats eat everything.

Unfortunately, this disciplined shepherding ends once the maize has been harvested and the goats are set loose to wantonly graze on........

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