Economic terms in the news during the Great Recession

It can hardly be contested that the economy is one of the leading factors of social change, if not the top one, as it is a powerful driver that determines the lives of individuals around the world, as well as geopolitical entities, societies, and, ultimately, the world. Global macro-economic events, therefore, have a profound impact on all aspects of society, including language. An economic crisis, for example, is likely to spark off a number of crucial changes in the living conditions of millions of people worldwide, but it also has the potential to shape human languages, as they adapt to describe the new situation. In this regard, the role of the media, and their potential to shape people’s ideas, should not be underestimated. During times of crisis, specialized news outlets act as an oracle that explains and interprets ongoing events, and attempts to predict future developments and outcomes. Needless to say, they primarily use language to accomplish their communication objectives and, whether consciously or not, they choose to use certain words and expressions over others. What is relevant from a purely linguistic point of view is that these lexical choices may eventually result in subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) changes in the semantics of words over a relatively short period of time, as they are used to express – and sometimes impose – a particular worldview, if not to manipulate trends and markets.

The purpose of this book is to explore how the meaning of specialized terms used to describe key macroeconomic indicators can experience significant shifts in connotation during major economic events, as reflected in their usage in mass media. From a sentiment analysis perspective, the book seeks to provide a detailed analysis of how such changes in connotation may occur and what factors may influence them, drawing on a range of case studies and examples from the Great Recession. By shedding light on the complex relationship between language, media, and macroeconomic phenomena, this book aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of the role that language plays in shaping our perceptions and responses to economic events.

Entering the term ‘rescue’ in a search engine in the early summer of 2019 would primarily return news about aids to US producers in the midst of a trade war with China. A year earlier, results would be about the NGO Open Arms and the rescue of human beings off the coast of Libya during the dramatic migration crisis in the Mediterranean. In 2008, we would most likely get results about the collapse of the global banking system asking to be ‘bailed out’ by states.

Beyond being a dark analogy, this example serves to illustrate the profound subjective nature of the texts that we find when we open a newspaper. Importantly, the sentiment that the word ‘rescue’ evokes in each case is very different. Thus the question arises: is communication and, consequently, the terminology used in it an instrument for subliminally projecting the sentiment of economic policies whose potential we are but beginning to glimpse? Specialized languages have their own terminology, expressions and constructions, which are far from unchanging, and which also reflect the spirit of the times. All these factors come to light in the way in which evaluations and opinions are expressed in texts.

Fifteen years after the events of 2008, the world is witnessing new and difficult challenges to the economy, but still has not forgotten – and is still suffering the consequences of – the effects of the Great Recession. On August 9, 2008 the European Central Bank and the US Federal Reserve had to intervene to tackle a banking system that had come to a grinding halt by injecting 100 billion euros. It was the day that ‘changed the world’, according to Adam Appelgarth, then head of the British bank Northern Rock and one of the ‘twenty-five faces of the economic disaster’, as published by the British newspaper The Guardian (Finch/Clark/Teather 2009). From that summer onwards, wholesale market activity began to plummet and months later the most iconic event of the Great Recession took place: on September 15, 2008, the US investment bank Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, thus initiating a global episode that a decade later continues to have repercussions on our daily lives. Although there was no bailout for Lehman, it was the first time that the public became aware of the term ‘bailout’ in an economic context, and it connoted, rather than a threshold of hope, a halo of concern.

That autumn was key in political, economic and, of course, linguistic terms. In the three weeks following the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the financial markets panicked and it was the first time that the public heard terms hitherto used exclusively in technical jargon, for example, the paradigmatic ‘credit crunch’, a term that initially referred to private banks refusing to give each other loans and that ended up spreading as a metonymy for that stage of the crisis. Since then, words such as ‘credit’ or ‘debt’ have become part of all forums and discussions, and have acquired different connotations depending on the economic context.

Governments promised to save the system by reinforcing both the banking sector and the public and private economy. Faced with the seriousness of a situation which was not yet fully evident to the population, a scenario of discursive action took place, more performative than philosophical: the main actors at the global level, such as Nicolas Sarkozy, pronounced themselves on a capitalist system that had run amok and had become an outdated entity that had to be restated on the basis of work and morality (Sarkozy 2008). In Spain, Rodríguez Zapatero’s cabinet decided to use euphemisms such as ‘desaceleración acelerada’, ‘dificultad que nos viene de fuera’ and ‘ajuste duro’ (‘accelerated deceleration’, ‘some difficulties coming from outside’, ‘hard adjustment’, respectively) in order to avoid the use of any direct reference to the explosion of the crisis (Garea 2008). These examples illustrate the power that the Great Recession had to spur changes in political discourse, which is in turn immediately reflected in the press and, consequently, provokes perlocutionary reactions among the different social actors, including the general population.

In the social sphere, new citizen movements flourished on a global scale around 2011 in response to the paradigm shift brought about by the crisis. These gained considerable traction and unheard-of social relevance, to the point that protesters were recognized as Time magazine’s figure of the year. The discursive shift provoked by citizen social actors such as the 15-M Movement in Spain, the overflow of traditional trade unionism in Greece, or the Occupy Wall Street protest camps initially in the United States and subsequently expanded to the rest of the world, opened a breach for new citizen-driven debates that questioned the ‘official’ experts’ discourse in the context of economic austerity policies.

Citizen participation in the political discourse meant an exponential acceleration in the exchange of transformative ideas, as the debate permeated deeply into all strata of society and, as a consequence, had profound political repercussions. From an eminently informative translation of political and economic decisions, some of the consequences of the austerity policies acquired a human face, such as the drama of evictions, or the consequences of funding cuts in public services.

Institutionally, the impact of these movements ultimately triggered the end of the two-party system in Spain, following the emergence of new political actors on both sides of the left-right political axis. In the rest of the world, some traditionally minority political representations were pushed forward, as illustrated by the ascent of Alexis Tsipras to the Greek government or the emergence of new figures in the Anglo world, such as the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn in the British Labour Party, or the meteoric candidacy of Bernie Sanders in the Democratic Party, both with eminently popular support outside the impetus of lobbies and other traditional interest groups.