English For Business – Financial Crisis Vocabulary

English For Business

English For Business

The financial crisis of the past few years has brought about the increased use of many English phrases and created many new terms. Any business newspaper, magazine or website is full of these English business words.

Below we take a look at a few of them, explain what they mean, and discuss where they came from. Lets begin;

  • bailout – means to rescue a business or economy. The term comes from ‘bailing out’ or saving a boat or air-balloon that is sinking.
  • Quantitative Easing (QE) – this is the process by where a government purchases new bonds using money that it has created from nowhere. This used to be called ‘printing new money’.
  • recession – the definition of a recession in the UK is 2 successive quarters of negative growth.
  • double-dip recession – this is when an economy goes in to recession, comes out of it, then heads back into recession quite quickly.
  • credit crisis – this is the period from 2008 until today when banks have minimised the amount of lending they offer to each other and to business. This lack of credit prohibits business from expanding and investing.
  • debt crisis – this is when companies and countries can no longer afford to pay back the interest on their debts.
  • depression – this is a sustained period of time lacking economic growth. A depression is much more severe than a recession.
  •  spending cuts – the move by many governments to reduce the amount government departments spend on the public sector.