Financial Lingo..for fun!

Financial lingo can also be funny sometimes!

A sample from The Wall Street Journal:"Some Financial Lingo Redefined":

• Federal Reserve: Extremely powerful, like God, and also moves in strange and mysterious ways.


• Commodities: Pigs with lipstick.


• Lottery tickets: Buying opportunity for folks who feel they don't pay enough state taxes.


• Car lease: Chance to pretend you are wealthy, while getting poorer with every monthly payment.


• Credit cards: Another chance.

Read more on: WSJ.com

Thank You Economy

A customer-focused company culture.

Gary Vaynerchuk wrote on Entrepreneur.com:

We're living in what I like to call the "Thank You Economy", because only the companies that can figure out how to mind their manners in a very old-fashioned way -- and do it authentically -- are going to have a prayer of competing.

Social media requires that business leaders start thinking like small-town shop owners. This means taking the long view and avoiding short-term benchmarks to gauge progress. It means allowing the personality, heart and soul of the people who run all levels of the business to show. And doing their utmost to shape word of mouth by treating each customer as though he or she were the most important customer in the world.

In short, business leaders are going to have to relearn the ethics and skills our great-grandparents' generation used in building their own businesses and took for granted.

Source: Entrepreneur.com

Dotconomy

Internet firms as a valuable source of economic insights.

Source: Economist

Happiness Index

The British government is set to measure the country's "happiness" in an effort to give a fuller picture of how the nation is performing.

David Cameron, the prime minister, who had previously called for "general well-being" to be assessed alongside traditional economic indicators, outlined some of the plans on Thursday, sparking criticism from some quarters.

Source: Aljazeera

Il Pil, il prodotto interno lordo, è l’unico indicatore che gli stati utilizzano per la contabilità nazionale. La ricchezza delle nazioni si misura calcolando solo tutte le attività dove c’è scambio di danaro. Tutto il resto non esiste...

Puntata di Report

Trickle Down Economy

An economic theory which states that investing money in companies and giving them tax breaks is the best way to stimulate the economy.

Proponents of this theory believe that when government helps companies, they will produce more and thereby hire more people and raise salaries. The people, in turn, will have more money to spend in the economy.

Source: Investopedia

trickle down theory: teoria della distribuzione capillare, espressione aggettivale, usata per indicare un qualcosa relativo o basato sulla teoria economica che sostiene che la moneta che si diffonde entro il sistema economico, in particolare la moneta proveniente dalle casse dello stato, avrà l\'effetto di stimolare lo sviluppo più se la distribuzione avviene attraverso le grandi imprese industriali che se essa avviene tramite benefici diretti, quali servizi sociali o opere pubbliche.

fonte: Proz

Double Dip Recession

A double-dip recession refers to a recession followed by a short-lived recovery, followed by another recession.

The causes for a double-dip recession vary but often include a slowdown in the demand for goods and services because of layoffs and spending cutbacks from the previous downturn.

A double-dip (or even triple-dip) is a worst-case scenario. Fear that the economy will move back into a deeper and longer recession makes recovery even more difficult.

Source: Investipedia

What's the point of niceness?

published on: BBC News

The governor of the Bank of England says it's been a nice decade, but is niceness really something to strive for, asks Julian Joyce, in the first of a series of articles about changing times.
The last 10 years have been a "nice" decade, according to Bank of England governor Mervyn King.
He was of course using the word in an acronymous and strictly economic sense, a shortening of Non-Inflationary Consistent Expansion. But the choice of this acronym was deliberate, carrying an undertone related to something more than inflation.

SOBER

Acronym to describe the financial characteristics of Britain’s next decade: Savings, Orderly Budgets, Equitable Rebalancing.

The Governor of the Bank of England has warned that Britons face a decade of saving more and spending less, Philip Aldrick reported in The Telegraph:

"Alluding to the “Non-Inflationary Consistently Expansionary” [NICE] decade just passed and coining a new acronym to describe the years ahead, he warned: “The next decade will not be nice. History suggests that after a financial crisis the hangover lasts for a while. So the next decade is likely to be a ‘SOBER’ decade – a decade of savings, orderly budgets, and equitable rebalancing… A sober decade may not be fun but it is necessary for our economic health.”

Source: Schott's Vocab

ABICI

Acronym for a group of growing economies: Africa, Brazil, India, China and Indonesia.

published on: Schott's Vocab

Reporting for Time on this year’s Global Forum in South Africa, Michael Elliott commented on the fragile economic recovery taking place in the developed economies of the Atlantic region, and spotlighted the “tremendous” performance of “what we will soon have to stop calling the developing world”:China grew by 8.7% in 2009, according to official figures. India showed excellent growth too, and even in Africa — so long dismissed by seers as an underperformer – growth hit 2% before the recession took hold, which followed years when the continent was growing at the historically robust rate of 6% or more.This isn’t simply a function of the famous BRICs – Brazil, Russia, India and China – setting the pace. Indeed, as veteran global economist Kenneth Courtis of Themes Investment Management pointed out, Russia has fallen out of the club of most-favored developing economies, having been unable (so far) to use its endowment of natural resources to build truly world-class companies. With Indonesia increasingly catching the attention of business leaders, and Africa too, it might be time to try a new acronym: ABICI, for Africa, Brazil, India, China and Indonesia. Whatever you call them, the performance of the leading economies of the developing world has been sufficiently robust that political leaders like Rob Davies, South Africa’s Minister for Trade and Industry, were able to trumpet the potential of south-south trade – while acknowledging that even the best-performing southern economies had been hurt by the continuing weakness in the rich world.

Animal names for economies

Will a new pride of economic lions take their place beside the Chinese dragon and the Indian tiger?


The term "tiger economies" to refer to the fab four of Asia dates back to the 1960s. (They are also known as the "little dragons" owing to China's influence.) Ireland adopted the "Celtic tiger" in the 1990s, despite there being no such beast—presumably it was worried that calling itself the "hare economy" would make it sound flaky. Scotland made a bid for "Celtic Lion" in 1997, on the reasonable basis that there is at least a lion on the Scottish Royal Standard. It never took off, though; neither did Scotland.Curiously, Russia's periodically hyperactive economy doesn't seem to have a common animal name. The "bear economy" is an obvious no-no, but people rarely use "tiger", even though there are tigers in Russia. Perhaps that's because they're Siberian tigers, which are in danger of going extinct. Sadly for Africa, though, the term "lion economies" and the associated predictions of an imminent boom are at least ten years old. Maybe they're hibernating lions.P.S.: It's a "pride of lions" and a "streak of tigers", but does anyone know the collective noun for dragons?

Source: Johnson

Getting a handle on the language

Thanks to the economy, technology and fashion, there are so many new words being created you'd have to be a "didiot" not to notice them. As a didiot myself, I assumed didiot means someone who's an idiot with digital technology (that would be moi), but no: It is a hybrid of "damn" and "idiot." A "yoot" sounds like either a Dr. Seuss character or the way your cousin Vinny would pronounce "youth," but instead it is a person young enough not to remember life before youtube.
Men were already suffering in the "mancession" -- meaning disproportionately more men are unemployed due to the languishing of traditionally male trades like construction. Now they have to cope with the "Tiger effect," too. That's newly alert wives checking up on them through cellphone, GPS, and e-mail records. And by the way, a GPS is not just a gizmo but also a driver that gives too many directions. I have just bought a GPS myself and love it, but wish that instead of the bossy female voice directing me this way and that, I could have mine programmed with Colin Firth telling me in his posh British accent, "Oops! This is a one-way, ducky!" or "Wait 'til the light goes green, love."
Anyway, the Tiger effect must be the downside of "funemployment" for some, that is, enforced time off work that might as well be used to do long-postponed enjoyable things. With today's technology, can cheaters of either gender really be dumb enough to think they won't get caught, or on some level do they want to be? Nah, that's giving them too much credit for psychological complexity. Sex addicts, my Aunt Mabel! They ain't nothin' but hounddogs.
Other new words for males include "hegans," men who are vegetarians but not necessarily sissies, and "heavage," for the male cleavage that Simon Cowell shows off so proudly. Back, too, is the "pornstache," the full luxuriant moustache of the 70s that was especially popular with newsmen and porn actors. Maybe someday the five o' clock shadow that lost Tricky Dick the presidential debate -- but that many women now inexplicably find sexy -- will also seem quaint.
We have the recession to thank for the lack of a "speeding cushion," that is the five miles above the speed limit that a nice ossifer used to let you get by with; now more tickets are being written as cities and states try to rev up their revenues. That "incentifies" drivers to follow the limits. I've been seeing "incentify" a lot in the business world; it's one of those conversions of a noun to a verb that drives traditionalists and grammarians crazy. Sure enough it sounds dopey, but I have come around to the belief that in language, change is inevitable and correctness rests mostly upon usage; it's like a river because it is never the same twice.
From my kids I've picked up "meh," which signifies profound indifference. An exchange might go like this. Question: "Do you want to rent Al Gore's documentary about climate change?" Answer: "Meh."
A neologism that strikes my fancy is "Nocialism," that is, the denial that a policy or law being proposed is an example of Socialism. In politics closer to home, I keep hearing Gov. Culver referred to regularly, but not affectionately, as "the big lug," a signal that his jig is up come November.
From the travel industry comes the word "yotel," very small but sometimes very fancy accommodations that originated in Japan, allowing people to experience luxury for less. From fashion this spring comes "the shoe boot," a warm weather version of the boot. For me, it conjures up a surprisingly tender "All in the Family" episode in which Archie recalls how other kids called him "shoe bootie" because he was so poor he had to wear one shoe and one boot to school. If you remember that episode, too, kid, you're no "yoot."

This post appeared originally in the Telegraph Herald in Dubuque, Iowa.