The New Financial Euphemisms - Telling It Like It Isn't *

You read an article and for the 50th time in the last several months you come across word combinations such as "quantitative easing" (here), effectively meaning printing money to purchase government bonds and other assets or words such as "conservatorship" (here) effectively meaning nationalization. It is not a "bankruptcy" anymore, it simply Chapter 11, or even simple - a "restructuring" you see...
As David Tice, CFA said in an interview that I posted yesterday - in the past when you wanted to compliment your wife, you'd sometimes say that she looks like a million bucks - you cannot say that anymore, you have to say "you look like a trillion dollars"...

I felt my financial vocabulary is somewhat outdated ("quantitative easing", geez) so here I gathered several GDII (Great Depression Two) vocabulay additions:

If you want to know what downgrowth, negative profit, negative equity, downvaluation, write downs, subprime and underbanked mean these days, visit this page at goodcopybadcopy.

"It's not about insolvency, it's a collateral crunch." Sean Kelly notes.

Layoffs, cutbacks and belt tightenings are now more gently called rightsizing, rationalizing, early retirement, furloughing, staff rebalancing, top grading, forced vacation, workforce reduction and downsizing or in Bitain Redundancy & Gardening leave. (enjoy the whole article here), "right-sizing", "raising the bar on talent", Krugman's favorite is "amortize the work force".

Don't you just love "synergy-related headcount adjustment"? What about "Head of Productivity"?

The credit crunch is... well...

"Severe contraction" is now used as an euphemism for depression and the word depression itself was once used as an euphemism for crisis.

Felix Salmon's favorite financial euphemism is the one for "doing nothing" – "preserving optionality", another euphemism found by the guys at Portfolio.com is for "getting stuck with a home you can't sell" – "promoting intergenerational wealth".

Kevin Maney thinks that there simply must be a Stanford MBA class titled "Euphemisms 101" which would be where future CEOs are taught what to say when the truth more or less sucks.

Well, there are many more and even more to come... like... "diet" for example... Feel free to contribute =)



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* a reference to the 1969 TIME article.