Time to Kill the Happy Talk

To ward off panics, financial media organizations are keeping Un-Happy Talk to a minimum. "We're very careful not to throw words around like 'meltdown' and 'free fall'," CNN correspondent Ali Velshi, who is getting mucho face time thanks to the meltdown and free fall, told The New York Times. The Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal is engaging in un-Murdochian restraint, banishing words like "crash" and "pandemonium." Maybe I have a limited vocabulary, but I'm not sure how else to characterize a month in which the country's largest financial institutions, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, had to be nationalized; Lehman Brothers, the fourth largest investment bank, filed for Chapter 11; AIG, a component of the Dow Jones industrial average, turned over most of its stock to the government in exchange for an $85 billion loan; the Treasury Department had to guarantee money-market funds to stop people from hoarding cash under their mattresses; gigantic Washington Mutual collapsed, the largest bank failure in U.S. history; and the nation's greatest financial minds have declared that a bailout the size of the Netherlands' GDP is needed to stop the bleeding. Yes, we have to be careful about crying "fire" in a crowded theater. But calling Wall Street's meltdown a meltdown is more like crying "fire" in a crowded inferno.

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