Data Diary

Surfing the meme – top five financial cliches for 2009

Posted on 18 December 2009

Just got time for a little reflection – through the lenses of our favourite memes.  Honorable mentions go to ‘Carry Trade‘ and the ‘New Normal‘ – but the winners of the top financial cliches of 2009 are…

#5 ‘Internal devaluation‘ – the cliche that got away.  Never really had the zing to make it in the real world I guess.  Still I give it marks for the deft bureaucratic manner in which it sanitised the debacle in Latvia.  Vive la internal devaluation!

#4 ‘Green Shoots‘ – Kermit might have had difficulty being green, but the reinvigoration of ‘green shoots’ was a masterstroke by the British network ITV in January 2009.  Pretty soon we were all seeing green (or brown for the colour challenged amongst us).

#3 ‘Moral Hazard‘ – 2009 was the year that marked the first deification of an individual as a living moral hazard – Congratulations Zen Ben.  Moral hazard has the longest history of all our cliches (starting out life in the 1600′s where it was used in insurance circles to refer to fraudulent behaviour by the insured).  While there have recently been valiant attempts to resurrect it as a pointed criticism – seems like the beneficiaries of taxpayer largesse interpret it more like a speed bump – something to be gingerly navigated so as to not damage the high performance suspension.

#2 ‘Unpredecented’ – the only thing certain about this term is that its use this year was unprecedented.  As Gore Vidal suggested, we are living in the United States of Amnesia.  When we outsource our memory to a microchip, everything is going to feel, well, unprecedented.

And the winner is…

#1 ‘Banker’s bleavage’ – a nasty irritation to the crest of the buttocks caused by stuffing overly crisp dollar bills down one’s trousers.  Also known as Bernanke burn.

For advice on how to treat banker’s bleavage click here.

(Okay ‘banker’s bleavage’ isn’t a cliche – I made it up – still it’s important to give back just a little to the Googleverse.)