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Sunday, February 1, 2009

Gnome-o-gram: What to Call the Present Era?

What shall we call the present financial era, especially in the United States, where events appear to be moving most rapidly and driving the world's markets?

It's usually in retrospect that such eras are named: “The Gilded Age”, “The Roaring Twenties”, “The Great Depression”, “Les Trente Glorieuses” (in France), “The Soaring Sixties”, “Stagflation”, “The Decade of Greed”, etc. In parallel, there are names given to political initiatives concurrent with these periods such as “Progressivism”, “The New Deal”, “The Great Society”, and so on.

So what shall we call the present epoch of deleveraging or, more to the point, how will historians looking back upon it after everything has been sorted out choose to designate it?

My prediction? “Game over.”

Update: Another suggestion, for those more apocalyptically inclined: “Financial End Times”. (2009-02-06 18:39 UTC)

Posted at February 1, 2009 23:46