Brad Listi: The (Great) Name Game ... What to Call the Current Financial Crisis?
[BRAD LISTI is the author of the Los Angeles Times bestselling novel Attention. Deficit. Disorder. and the founder of TheNervousBreakdown.com. He has a BFA from the University of Colorado and an MFA from the University of Southern California, and he teaches creative writing and English composition at Santa Monica College. He can be found online at www.bradlisti.com.]
The first World War didn't get its name until the prospect of a second one came around. Before then, it was often referred to, without irony, as The Great War or, more optimistically, as The War to End All Wars.
The Great Depression wasn't called The Great Depression until well after the stock market collapse of 1929. Furthermore, the twentieth-century Great Depression doesn't even stand alone as the only Great Depression in history. Far from it, in fact. There was a "great" depression in Finland as recently as the 1990s. And British economic historians often use the term "Great Depression" to describe the agricultural collapse of the late 19th century, which laid waste to the British farming community. (This period is also sometimes referred to as the Long Depression.)
And isn't it interesting how our news media scrambles to brand things? Crises in particular. Wars. Famines. Floods. Massive disasters of any kind.
Black Monday.
Black Tuesday.
D-Day.
9/11.
In the age of the 24-hour news cycle, the compulsion to reduce incredibly complex quagmires into thirty-second soundbites seems to have reached an all-time high.
"The news always feels the need to name everything," says Jonathan Wald, the senior vice president for business news at CNBC. "If it's not branded, it doesn't exist in modern television."
Adds NBC News anchor Brian Williams: "When you're in the middle of something, it's hard to brand it."
Indeed---at least insofar as the current economic crisis is concerned. We are now many months into a deep and ugly recession of genuine historical importance, and to the best of my knowledge, no official moniker has yet emerged. Maybe this is because we're still in shock. Our collective tongue is tied. Or perhaps we're still deciding, still in the thick of it, and therefore cannot see with clarity the ultimate nature of the beast. Maybe an official name won't emerge for years to come, when at long last we reach a final, official consensus on what the hell just happened to us. Maybe with time comes perspective...the gradual emergence of widely agreed-upon (generic) terminology.
Over the past several weeks, many journalists have made a point to address this very conundrum, including Brian Stelter of the New York Times and Justin Fox at Time magazine's The Curious Capitalist.
Darren Gersh of the Nightly Business Report also took a stab at it, narrowing down his list of names to the following three contenders: The Subprime Crisis, The Credit Crisis, and The Great Unwind.
The Subprime Crisis and The Credit Crisis are generic enough to have no official creator. The Great Unwind, however, has been traced back to Stefan-Michael Staimann and Susanne Knips at the Frankfurt investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort.
Says Staimann: "I am not sure where exactly I picked up the phrase 'great unwind' (I can't believe I invented it). To me, it simply describes nicely the reversal of financial imbalances and excesses that had built up primarily in credit markets over the last few years."
Hard to say if Staimann's tag will stick. As Gersh points out, The Great Unwind seems a bit too specific and insider-ish to take hold. If past is prologue, it would seem that the eventual winner will have to be utterly simplistic in nature. (See: World War I, World War II, etc.)
With this in mind, I thought it might be nice to take a poll:
What Should We Name the Current Economic Crisis?
The Fall
The Great Recession
The Great Correction
The Credit Crunch
The Crash of 2008
The Reckoning
The Great Meltdown
The Great Collapse
The Bush Depression
The Great Bust
The Boomer Bust
The Transformation
The Great Bushwhack
Depression 2.0
The Econalypse
The Not-So-Great Depression
The Greed Depression
The Great Deleveraging
The Great Flush
FreeMarketGate
The Long Slide
Americorpse
The Great Regression
Ponzipalooza
The Great Meltdown
The Credit Crisis
The Subprime Crisis
The Great Unwind
Other:
Read entire article at Huffington Post (Blog)
The first World War didn't get its name until the prospect of a second one came around. Before then, it was often referred to, without irony, as The Great War or, more optimistically, as The War to End All Wars.
The Great Depression wasn't called The Great Depression until well after the stock market collapse of 1929. Furthermore, the twentieth-century Great Depression doesn't even stand alone as the only Great Depression in history. Far from it, in fact. There was a "great" depression in Finland as recently as the 1990s. And British economic historians often use the term "Great Depression" to describe the agricultural collapse of the late 19th century, which laid waste to the British farming community. (This period is also sometimes referred to as the Long Depression.)
And isn't it interesting how our news media scrambles to brand things? Crises in particular. Wars. Famines. Floods. Massive disasters of any kind.
Black Monday.
Black Tuesday.
D-Day.
9/11.
In the age of the 24-hour news cycle, the compulsion to reduce incredibly complex quagmires into thirty-second soundbites seems to have reached an all-time high.
"The news always feels the need to name everything," says Jonathan Wald, the senior vice president for business news at CNBC. "If it's not branded, it doesn't exist in modern television."
Adds NBC News anchor Brian Williams: "When you're in the middle of something, it's hard to brand it."
Indeed---at least insofar as the current economic crisis is concerned. We are now many months into a deep and ugly recession of genuine historical importance, and to the best of my knowledge, no official moniker has yet emerged. Maybe this is because we're still in shock. Our collective tongue is tied. Or perhaps we're still deciding, still in the thick of it, and therefore cannot see with clarity the ultimate nature of the beast. Maybe an official name won't emerge for years to come, when at long last we reach a final, official consensus on what the hell just happened to us. Maybe with time comes perspective...the gradual emergence of widely agreed-upon (generic) terminology.
Over the past several weeks, many journalists have made a point to address this very conundrum, including Brian Stelter of the New York Times and Justin Fox at Time magazine's The Curious Capitalist.
Darren Gersh of the Nightly Business Report also took a stab at it, narrowing down his list of names to the following three contenders: The Subprime Crisis, The Credit Crisis, and The Great Unwind.
The Subprime Crisis and The Credit Crisis are generic enough to have no official creator. The Great Unwind, however, has been traced back to Stefan-Michael Staimann and Susanne Knips at the Frankfurt investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort.
Says Staimann: "I am not sure where exactly I picked up the phrase 'great unwind' (I can't believe I invented it). To me, it simply describes nicely the reversal of financial imbalances and excesses that had built up primarily in credit markets over the last few years."
Hard to say if Staimann's tag will stick. As Gersh points out, The Great Unwind seems a bit too specific and insider-ish to take hold. If past is prologue, it would seem that the eventual winner will have to be utterly simplistic in nature. (See: World War I, World War II, etc.)
With this in mind, I thought it might be nice to take a poll:
What Should We Name the Current Economic Crisis?
The Fall
The Great Recession
The Great Correction
The Credit Crunch
The Crash of 2008
The Reckoning
The Great Meltdown
The Great Collapse
The Bush Depression
The Great Bust
The Boomer Bust
The Transformation
The Great Bushwhack
Depression 2.0
The Econalypse
The Not-So-Great Depression
The Greed Depression
The Great Deleveraging
The Great Flush
FreeMarketGate
The Long Slide
Americorpse
The Great Regression
Ponzipalooza
The Great Meltdown
The Credit Crisis
The Subprime Crisis
The Great Unwind
Other: