Yesterday I went to the JSE building on Megabuck Mountain (aka Exchange Square) for a meeting. Immediately after wafting through the large electrically powered revolving door and into the foyer I was confronted by an almost life size plastic cow. Glorying in full Friesland colours and splattered by some incongruous logos and slogans, it suffers the indignity of headgear in the form of a yellow hard hat and bafflingly, a soccer ball affixed to its nose.
After submitting to my own indignity of the typical office block entrance security requirements, I wandered over to take a closer look at this astonishing sight. It is, it seems, art. The poor beast has a future under an auctioneer’s hammer to the benefit of some charitable cause and the good news ends there. I can just picture the scene of well lubricated over exuberant traders, disguised in black ties, vying with each other to pay too much to own a three quarter size model hollow plastic cow. Just what the sober buyer will tell his wife is less easy to imagine. I fear it will not be welcomed as a nursery ornament.
A covert glance confirmed that it was indeed a cow and not, as one might have hoped in such surroundings, a bull. What message can the JSE be trying to send, by permitting the installation of such a maligned bovine. Surely the brief to the artist should have hinted at the need for something a little more – shall we say – bullish? After all, in the immediate surrounds one will find the well known bronze of bull and bear in battle and outside there’s the rather more stylistic rendition of the same contest in a stainless steel and rotating fountain format.
And it rained on midwinter’s day in Johannesburg.
If ever there was a sign that the bull market is finished it has to be this!
I guess that another phenomenon that we all wish we could understand is the rand. Its strength has been amazing. This week it re-visited multi-year record highs. Only against the Pound in December was it a bit better than it is now. The business papers and websites have been full of theories and explanations for this performance and some of them may be true. Whether any of them lead to an accurate forecast of how it goes on from here we shall have to wait and see. But what is certain is that there are very few exporters making more or even the same profits that they were a year ago and that the forthcoming reporting season will have many unhappy stories.
And there may not be just the same enthusiastic bidding for their shares as there will be for the cow.
James Greener
25th June 2004
