This economic recovery is brought to you by the letters U, W, V, J and L.
In a never ending quest to create new jargon, financial analysts, economists and journalists are now subjecting the innocent public to Sesame Street-like scenarios about when the worst financial crisis since the second world war will start to abate.
This follows on from their previous attempts to jazz things up with forecasts about the 'green shoots of recovery'. Unfortunately, those shoots quickly turned brown and died.
According to the experts, in the V-shaped scenario, the pain is relatively short-lived and the economy bounces back quickly. In a U-shaped recovery, the downturn is a little longer, represented by the curve at the bottom of the U.
But a W- and an L-shaped recovery? Well, apparently, a W-shaped recovery is a nasty one with double dips as the economy appears to recover only to deteriorate again. And the L-shaped recovery may not even be a recovery at all, as everything flat-lines (for those paying attention, that would be represented by the bottom stroke of the letter L). Presumably, a VW-shaped recovery would be a well-engineered recession ideal for cruising down the Autobahn.
Before we bring on Big Bird, Oscar and the Cookie Monster for a further lesson in economics, we might ask why the smart guys in the financial world need to make up clever imagery in the first place. It is probably the same reason they use phrases like 'these shares are going to be upsiding in Q1 before downsiding in Q3' to describe stocks going up and down - their jobs depend on saying things in an extremely complex way to predict the unpredictable. Even some analysts appear to realise that things are getting out of hand.
