5 posts tagged “credit crunch”

Price pounce

Like you, I have occasionally experimented with inventing new words and phrases with a view to disseminating them and so enjoying the immortality that comes with permanently swelling the English lexicon.  Who hasn't thought, at some point, 'Someone must be coming up with these new words - someone no less a slob than I.  Why not give it a go?' 

Who indeedum?

Just how popular your neologism becomes is a good measure of both your powers of influence and your catchinessability.  But of course it helps to have technology behind you.  Had the internet been around when I was a child, the term 'bingobongobango!' might be the superlative of choice for today's street youth, instead of the occasion for my family threatening to fling me from an upstairs window.  That's why, when I heard a superb new term on the bus the other day, I decided to use the global reach of this 'web log' to give it wings.

Two women were discussing their favourite clothes shop. 

"______* was packed on Saturday," said one.

"It's because there's a price pounce,' quoth the other.

Price pounce!  I love it!

I love it because, like 'credit crunch', it combines catchiness, vividness, and the clunky use of a verb as a noun.

I love it because you can sort of guess what it means even though it's stupid.  Presumably a 'price pounce' is when low prices, perhaps driven by that other alliterative economic condition, lead to a surge in purchasing.  It could be used to describe specific situations (there's a price pounce going on at Tesco) or an overall market situation (consumer spending is soaring because of the Price Pounce) with equal ludicrousness.

I love it because it summons images of people leaping around shops.

As any economist knows, a recession is officially over when Radio 4 report a bit of good news about the economy for four days in a row.  It hasn't happened yet; but perhaps (I've been wondering) that's because the media lack suitably delicious terms with which to describe financial felicitousness.  Financial ruin and evil bankers make good soundbites (FUND-LOVING CRIMINALS!) but increased profits at M&S sounds as lively as loam.  Bad news makes good headlines and vice versa.

But clearly the public - or at least the public on the otherwise awful Number 66(6) to Digbeth - are taking matters into their own mouths.  We must support them.

Anyway, at hts we've been bandying 'price pounce' all week in the office.  But we are a mere handful of spangle-pusses**; there's only so much that we can do.

Any suggestions for cheery economic terms welcome.  Also welcome are suggestions about how we can get 'price pounce' in the OED.

* not real name

** worth a try

French fly

Careful what you wish for, etc.  You convince the Boss to let you regularly dodge work to post thoughts in a near-hermetic e-cell somewhere on the web, and the next thing you know, your blogging commitment is an albatross - or, as the new Junior OED puts it, excising the word 'Queen' to make room, an alblogtross.  A disappointing abundance of real work strangles your intentions to sit around posting your reflections on emoticons and peanut Kitkats.  Bereft of time, your spangly insights slop about in your head unformed, and become a sort of mush that you dread having to filter.

Although everyone in the office is working at the moment, it so happens that they are also intermittently discussing our consultant Danny's claim that Burger King put something on their chips that is also used on the wings of stealth bombers.  And so I feel reasonably guiltless about abandoning admin for ten minutes to write down my tip of the day.  It's a follow-on from this post about not limiting your options if you're looking for a new job.  Coincidentally, it's also about slipping under the radar.

Warning: the following tip is only relevant to the few people who are posting CVs on internet job boards with salary expectations wildly lower than their current/last salary, in the hope of appearing bargainesque.  It can also be read by people who fear they might, in the near future, be trapped in a lift with such a person.

We're getting a worrying amount of CVs through from people who have been made redundant and, in order to secure a new position quickly, are saying that they'll work for a third of their previous salary.  Some of these people are putting their CVs on internet job boards, so I thought I'd post the following quick tip, which has some broader application, maybe:

If you're very flexible on the salary you'll accept, don't say so upfront on internet job boards. 

Why?  Because if a recruiter is scanning through the cover details of candidates on a job site, looking for (say) a project manager in the automotive industry, and the salary for the role is (say) £35,0000, chances are they'll unthinkingly screen out candidates asking for (say) 50k+, and they'll also screen out candidates asking for (say) 20k.  The former, they'll assume, are probably too senior, and the latter are probably too junior.  Salary expectations are a rough guide to one's level of experience, and although your CV will tell us how senior you are, we might not even download your CV if your cover suggest that you are too inexperienced for our role.

Your job title on the cover information doesn't necessarily make things clear, either.  An employer or recruiter who, scanning zillions of names on a job board, sees this -

PROJECT MANAGER

Clare Hair

Target job: IT manager

Desired salary: 20k

- will not necessarily think what you want them to think, viz, 'Ah - a bargain!'  In all likelihood they'll assume that you're a junior candidate, working for a small company, with a boss who has patronised you by calling you a Manager when in fact you only clean the fluff off the mice.

Sod's Law determines that the only people who will assume that you are, in fact, a senior candidate, are people actually looking for 20k candidates.  They'll think that you've committed a typo.

If you're really flexible regarding salary, leave your expectations blank on the covering information on job sites, and instead indicate your flexibility in your CV's opening blurb.

Broader application: when posting details about yourself on the internet, try to make all the information congruent.

Back to work / jokes about stealth chips.

Tomorrow: something about Christmas.

Banking today

My grasp of financial matters barely enables me to make sense of It's A Wonderful Life, never mind understand the economics behind why nobody will be naming their newborn twins Fannie and Freddie for the foreseeable future.  And it seems as though the more I listen to Radio 4 on the way to work, the less I comprehend, despite Evan Davis' brilliantly pugilistic approach to interviewing.

Here are the questions I most want answers to:

- What should us members of the public be doing right now?

- Isn't pumping a load of money into the economy when the banks aren't lending to each other a bit like injecting blood into someone whose heart has stopped?

- Why can't all the Bailout Billions be used to provide a safety-net so that banks can start lending to each other?  A sort of insurance policy to incentivise the kind of maverick banking we need to jump-start the economy?  Then, if the safety net isn't needed, the money can go back into our pockets!

Any answers in patronisingly simple terms appreciated...

Sorta related:

everything i know about the credit crunch

Gorgeous q10

Here's something not to do during a credit crunch: develop an addiction to beautiful, gorgeous things that aren't beautiful or gorgeous. Learn, dear reader, from my folly!

In short, I have become intoxicated by The New Gorgeousness.  Here's how it happened.

Words are living things, and they have feelings, even those floozy-words who work in advertising. For example, in the world of marketing, a superlative can only tolerate an association with haircare products for so long. Then it rebels. The words 'gorgeous' and 'beautiful' are textbook examples. At some point these words broke out of their gilded cages and started getting work in adverts for cars, ratchets, grouting guns, fibre shotgun cartridges, hooded pet beds, you name it. Suddenly everything is beautiful or gorgeous. And because most of these things are manifestly not gorgeous, describing them as gorgeous makes them seem better than gorgeous: it makes them seem intriguing.

Don't believe me? Google 'gorgeous' + just about anything on earth, and before you can say 'inappropriate' you'll have stumbled upon an endorsement reminiscent of an eight-year-old girl eulogising a pop icon, even if the subject is an open source plain-screen text editor.

Of course, different beholders have different eyes. You may think that a hand-wired amplifier with 6L6 valves is a thing of sublime beauty - I'm not here to judge you - but you've always felt that using the B word about your Deluxe Reverb might mark you as some kind of wet-lipped fetishist. Friend, those days are gone. Step into the light. Times have changed, and you are free to go on mainstream internet forums and wax downright romantic about Leonie's (you call her Leonie, for reasons that only fellow enthusiasts will understand) reverb tank without fear of insult or legal action. And when someone like me, who doesn't know a Dumble from a Dr Z, reads your tribute, he doesn't think, 'How terrifying' - he thinks, 'Why haven't I ever noticed the beauty of tube amplifiers? And what can I do to remedy this? And where can I buy one?'

It drums up sales aplenty, this application of aesthetic terms products that are plain, plain ugly, or frankly functional.  The trick works on me, anyway, almost daily.  The less an item seems amenable to being labelled gorgeous, the more excited I get about it when a marketeer describes it as gorgeous. Call a wedding dress beautiful, and I'll think 'So?' An Amazon.co.uk review describing a Viking-themed death metal album as 'beautiful', on the other hand, gets me at least intrigued enough to waste my money on it. (I own more Viking death metal albums than wedding dresses). How on earth, I wonder when I read the review, can someone describe an album that commemorates Thor's battle victories with grunts and blastbeats as 'beautiful'? Answer: it must have hidden depths! Oh, I love hidden depths. p-l-a-y-.-c-o-m-b-l-o-o-d-h-a-m-m-e-r-

Obviously, an intoxication with beautiful stuff can be expensive, so I've developed a way to slake my thirst without spending any money. It started with Vox. I got a Vox account because someone described Vox as 'beautiful', even though I'd never really thought of blogging software as particularly beautiful before. Interesting, yes; beautiful, no. I started using Adobe's Buzzword because someone described it as 'gorgeous'. I'm writing this on the 'gorgeous' open-source word processor Q10 - see the screenshot at the top of this post.  They're free, they're fab, and I probably wouldn't have investigated them if someone hadn't taken the time to write about them in terms more appropriate to Bond girls.

The thing is, when I look closely, I think I see the gorgeousness too.  I see the Emperor's clothes and I want to get some myself.  Q10 is basically a blank screen. (Although Q10's 'typewriter' sound effect is sampled from the film Amelie, which is a bit bloody lovely, isn't it?)  But that's the thing about The New Gorgeousness: it doesn't jump out at you. You have to look for it, or wait for it to emerge, or in some cases imagine it.

Steal adjectives from one realm and apply them to another; be inappropriate and thereby generate intrigue - these might be the future maxims of marketing. The terms Gorgeous and beautiful will lose their looks eventually, and other superlatives will migrate from their native jobs and take their place. I'm looking forward to 'the nourishing new Ford Focus'.  But no matter how this thing develops, audacious and sometimes confusing incongruity is a powerful force in marketing, and if you are as susceptible to it as I am, you need to actively seek out free gorgeous products on which to glut yourself and thereby reduce your appetite. I'll post any particularly shiny ones I find.

By the way, I do find those old Fender tweed amps quite lovely.  Your own 'eye-of-the-beholder' confessions are welcome.

Trader

Like many others who blog on behalf of their employers, I have felt pressure lately to resist the urge to diarise amusing pet incidents and instead write something informative about the economic situation.  In fact, I have been avoiding writing anything at all until I learned something informative about the economic situation.  Others are not so conscientious.  It is doubtful, for example, that the people who own the old converted factory in which HTS is located know much more than me about the credit crunch, but they have not let this prevent them from getting up and doing something - specifically, turning the building's heating off and laughing while we freeze.  It is in this spirit of 'act first, have some ideas later' that I have decided to share with you the few things I do know about our economic situation (before my frigid fingers turn black and drop off).

1. The economic crisis is too complex for any human to understand.  At the same time, the measures that could have prevented it aren't that much more complex than those advocated by any number of fairy tales involving prudent and imprudent pigs, mice, wolves etc.

2. The credit crunch is a great time for keeping money circulating by buying stuff!  Shares especially.  If you have some savings squirreled away, it is also a good time to buy a house or a commercial bank.

3. Even though the situation is grim, you should start doing now what you should have done years ago (avoid spending on credit where possible and funnel at least 10% of your income into a high-interest account) but didn't do because you were waiting for some kind of upturn in your fortunes that would mean you could funnel 10% of your income into a high-interest account without you having to cut down on takeaways and bottles of wine.  Note that by 'you' I was referring to 'me'.

4. Nancy Pelosi was right, although her 'golden parachute' metaphor was perhaps confusing, given that a parachute made of any kind of metal both wouldn't stop you falling, and would squash you after you'd hit the ground.  But her point was spot on - taxpayers' money should not be used as a golden parachute (?) to save the fatcats who reduced the global economy to chaos!  It's much better to let the economy melt down, witness the total collapse of society, then eat the fatcats or make them our slaves.  And slowly build western civilisation back up to its peak of greatness, which for me was in the 1980s.  Go hair metal!

Incidentally, I am also against using taxpayers' money to save people from sinking ships.  Why give a golden parachute (?) to those fatcat ship-builders when their grasp of hull metrics proves faulty?

Anyway, I know some other things, but I will have to stop here, because my fingers have gone blue and I intend to warm them by making a cup of tea and holding it for ten minutes while pretending to look at something important on my computer monitor and occasionally nodding and stabbing Caps Lock.  Darn those well-heated fatcats who own our building!

Of course, I'LL be the one laughing when I retire early thanks to my squirrelled-away 10% hi-interest savings, which I am going to start squirrelling away this very afternoon.  Or I might wait till next week, and spend this week's 10% on a bottle of Balvenie Doublewood, which is on special offer at Waitrose, probably thanks to the credit crunch.  Golden parachute, silver lining.