Vocabulary notes

• consumers – потребители

• prosperity – преуспевание, процветание

• temptation – соблазн, искушение

• tighten the belt – затянуть потуже пояс (с целью

экономии)

• retail therapy – зд. терапевтический эффект от

посещения магазинов

• debt culture – привычка жить в долг

• live off credit – жить в кредит/в долг

• compulsive shoppers – зд. неразборчивый/импульсивный

покупатель

• expensive – дорогостоящий, ценный

• desperate to get back – прилагающий отчаянные

to work – усилия снова найти работу

• control her mood – управлять своим настроением

• …track the leakage – следить за расходами

(«утечкой» денег)

• …are leaking cash – зд. безрассудно тратят деньги

TEXT 2

New terms from the last global recession

Introduction

The Global Depression of 2008–2010 is considered by many economists to be the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. It was started by a liquidity shortfall in the United States banking system, and has resulted in the collapse of large financial institutions, the bailout of banks by national governments, and downturns in stock markets around the world. In many areas, the housing market has also suffered, resulting in numerous evictions, and prolonged vacancies. It contributed to the failure of key businesses, declines in consumer wealth estimated in the trillions of U.S. dollars. It also contributed to the appearance of new words and expressions in the sphere of economics in general and the banking system in particular.

A lot of new terms have recently come out of the US banking system. The US Treasury Department is now going to evaluate banks by using a 'stress test’ in the medical sense, you can undergo a stress test to see, for instance, how strong your heart is. So that is used as a diagnostic method in medicine. Stress tests are also used, for instance, in information technology to test software in different situations. In the financial sense, it is to determine how robust (strong) a bank or other financial institution is to withstand further economic conditions that could increasingly get worse in the future.

And now we have words like 'good bank' and 'bad bank' and 'zombie bank.' What are those?

The zombie bank is a term that has s been used to refer to a bank that really should have gone bust but it is being kept alive by government guarantees in the form of bailout money. So there are banks that people are saying 'Well, it's really just surviving because it is being propped up by the government.' So it's a zombie – it is really already dead, but the government is somehow trying to keep alive a bank that is already dead because its stock is almost worthless, its value has really gone under. And so people are talking about zombie banks in this way. But there are a lot of banks that are in a kind of a gray area right now, where it's unclear what their future is going to be. And what happens with them will really be contingent on what happens with the government taking over their bad debt, what is often called 'toxic debt' or 'toxic assets.' And so the proposal is to have a government-run bank, which has been labeled a bad bank. That would allow these private banks to unload all of their bad debt. There are people in the government who don't like that term. They would prefer to call it an 'aggregator bank' because it aggregates all of this toxic debt from the private banks and allows the government to deal with it without the government completely taking

over the bank. Often we need some distance on a particular event before we really know what new terminology is going to describe it. For instance, we don't really even know what to call this current economic downturn (2008 -2010). There have been lots of suggestions about calling it the Great Recession or the Great Credit Crunch or various other terms. But like the Great Depression of the 1930s we probably need some distance before we really have a label that will stick.

Here is an additional short list of newly-coined or now revived words and phrases:

1) bankster: combination of "bank" and "gangster" (revival of term from the '30s);

2) shovel-ready: used to describe infrastructure projects that are ready to go when stimulus money is available;

3) three-legged stool: Obama's metaphor for a multi-pointed approach to economic recovery (restoring jobs, restoring credit, regulatory reform);

4) depression: a dangerous word, as British Prime Minister Gordon Brown recently learned. He dared to use the D-word to describe the global economic picture, but then he issued a correction saying that he meant "recession." Ironically, "depression" was originally used by Herbert Hoover as a more benign (gentle) term for what had previously been called a (financial) "panic”;

5) doing more with less: a management cliche used to justify downsizing and belt-tightening. The expression goes back to the 19th century but became a catchphrase during the austerity measures of World War II.

Source: adapted from Ben Zimmer, visualthesaurus.com