So, what should we call it, anyway?

With what is likely to be a historic bailout of the financial markets on the horizon, we’re going to admit that we’ve been sort of disappointed. Not because of the bailout provisions, mind you, which we’ve written plenty about. No, we’re referring to the nickname for this mess. The 1930s had the Great Depression, the late 1980s the Oil Patch crisis, and the late 80s even had Black Monday for a single bad day. This crisis makes the eighties look like a walk in the park. But yet, no name has surfaced and stuck. No nickname for the plan being devised by Congressional leaders in a harried attempt to prevent our very destruction seems to have really struck a chord. Is it the Mother of All Bailouts, perhaps, as Calculated Risk has been using? Or TARP, as in Troubled Asset Resolution Program? With all due deference, we humbly feel that a colleague has done one better. And this one, we hope, will stick. That good friend said that with lawmakers scrambling to establish a revised bailout proposal, a new name for the bailout might now be needed: the Congressional Rescue Action Plan. We’ll leave the acronym to HW readers to decipher.