Crisis metaphors (AN ESSAY)

The great financial crisis has produced a cluster of cliches and a meltdown of metaphors. New York Times' Jeff Zeleny page one piece led off this morning: "President-elect Barack Obama sought to seize the reins of the economic crisis Monday as he and his new economic team worked closely with President Bush to inject confidence..."

There we have "seizing the reins" as in taking control of the animal, the country or economy being a dumb animal that needs to be led by wise officials.

A runaway

Another interpretation of this metaphor could be of the financial crisis as a panicked, runaway horse. This was a fresh metaphor a century ago when the streets were full of horses and apparently there were occasional scary 'runaways' when a frightened horse bolted.

The hero was the guy who somehow leapt onto the horse's back, and got the animal under control. 

But who the heck has seen a runaway horse in a time when horses are all out in the countryside, kept by a tiny few as large pets.

Jump-start

Then there is the auto-mechanic's metaphor of giving the economy a "jump start" as if the economy bears some resemblance to a gasoline spark ignition engine with a flat battery that needs a jumper lead applied to the battery terminals. The jump-start metaphor implies that the vehicle has just one simple obvious problem, a flat battery to which there is a simple solution, apply electric power.

Jolt

President-elect Obama has spoken of the economy as needing a "jolt." That's apparently a heart disease metaphor, where the solution to a stopped heart is to apply a jolt in the form of physical pounding or perhaps a jolt of electricity. That metaphor suggests there's some urgency, better quick and crude than slower and more carefully considered, because somehow the patient is at imminent risk of death.

Shoring

A further metaphor has the economy being "shored up". This of course is a civil engineering metaphor. The wall, perhaps a retaining wall, is leaning and in danger of falling over so you install props or ties, improvisations to offset the overturning forces at work.

But economies don't fall over do they?

Troubled assets

Another metaphor comes from social work or psychiatry - "troubled assets."

We had the TARP, the Troubled Asset Relief Program for which the Congress appropriated $700 billion. Treasury secretary Hank 'Flip Flop' Paulson, said he needed this for an urgent program to relieve financial institutions of some of their "troubled" assets.

After six weeks trying to come up with some remedial programs like reverse auctions the country's chief social worker then changed his mind and decided he had better uses for some of the money, like recapitalizing banks.

Now in his third flip this attention-span defective says he wants to get into buying mortgage backed securities.

Toxic assets

Environmental regulators have spawned another metaphor - "toxic assets". Redolent of the Superfund cleanup program this designates certain assets as toxic, seemingly a contradiction in terms.

Isn't something toxic a liability? Ah, never mind.

Bailout

Bailouts of course are a nautical metaphor. When your boat's taking on water you try to bail it out.

Of course the bailout metaphor leaves undefined what's causing the ship to take on water. Here left and right have very different reads on what ails the hull of the economic vessel.

The left sees the problem as 'deregulation'. But the right sees it as a thoroughly government-made bubble in the hull - produced by loose money and a deadly combination of government encouragement of subprime lending and the 'moral hazard' of government backing of the funny-name Fanniemacs and Freddiemays, encouraged to always "roll the dice" further by the likes of congressman Barney Frank.

The left is hard put to name any deregulation that occurred, so we think the right's right on this - the cracks in the sides of the vessel bear a clear stamp Made In Washington DC.

Stimulus

Then there's the stimulus, "something that excites an organism or part to functional activity" according to a physiology dictionary. The economic stimulus comes as a "package" in current metaphors. The problem with stimuluses (more correctly stimuli) is that they often don't stimulate.

When the government spends billions of dollars it sounds as if it will be economically stimulating until you ask where those billions of dollars are coming from, as the economist nark is apt to do. If they are borrowed then other kinds of borrowing will be crowded put. If they are raised by taxation then incomes will be lowered by the amount of the taxes and offsetting private spending will occur. If the government's central bank just generates more money in the process then it is liable to inflationary.

Thus the Bush administration had an enormous "stimulus program" in which checks of $750 were mailed to US taxpayers and they did zero stimulating of the economy.  Of course Obama stimuli could just have their own special magic...

TOLROADSnews 2008-11-26 ADDITION 2008-11-27 16:00