Bear Markets and Beyond - A Bestiary of Business Terms
Unicorns, narwhals, yaks, cows and civets – what have all these creatures got to do with your hard-earned cash? Well, far more than you might think at first glance.
They are all beasts that appear in the global economic ecosystem. They pop up as warnings, messages and signals and provide us with useful analogies for describing and navigating what can sometimes be a confusing, closed-off world.
Animals have always exerted a strong hold on our imagination. You only have to look at prehistoric cave paintings to see how central they were to our existence and, in capturing these images and using them to pass on messages to the community, we can see how they were our first linguistic tools and shaped our relationship with each other.
It’s therefore not surprising that, many millennia later, our contemporary Capitalist world is populated with metaphorical animals that stalk the landscape and alert us in the same way to what we can trust and what we should fear. And so, as we find ourselves in the financial jungle, a place of intense competition, where the rules are simply; survival of the fittest, we hope this guide will be your friend. The jargon of the business world is a code but we’re on hand to crack it.
You wouldn’t want to enter a bear pit unprepared, so watch out for the big beasts baring their teeth and keep your wits about you as you follow us through the undergrowth...
The following is an excerpt from ‘Bear Markets and Beyond: A Bestiary of Business Terms’ by Dhruti Shah.
NARWHAL
A Canadian tech startup valued at more than $1 billion Canadian dollars and which was founded after 1999 can be described as a Narwhal. The term was coined by Brent Holliday, CEO of Vancouver company Garibaldi Capital Advisors. He chose the name as he ‘understood the narwhal’s horn was to break through the ice because they’re mammals and have to breathe, so that’s a great metaphor’. The tusks actually seem to be for sensory purposes but Holliday dismissed that and preferred to keep the original term. It has now gained wider usage and is often seen as a mascot for Canada’s best performing companies – a unicorn of the sea.
VAMPIRE SQUID
This expression came out of a famous Rolling Stone profile on Goldman Sachs, written by the journalist Matt Taibbiin 2009.
He said: ‘The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money’.
He was writing in the context of the 2008 global financial crash and its aftermath but the label has stuck to the bank ever since.
HAMSTERKAUF
In 2020, the world came to an unexpected standstill as Covid-19, a new strain of coronavirus, took hold. Countries were put in lockdown, travel restrictions implemented and self-isolation measures put in place.
Despite attempts by governments to urge people to stay calm, customers seeking to stockpile led to a surge in demand for toilet roll, pasta and hand gel, among other commodities. This also meant that Hamsterkauf, a popular German word which translates to ‘hamster purchase’ came to the attention of the world.
It’s a word that represents panic buying and a rise in Google searches and instances of its use on Twitter show that’s just what was happening.
People were posting images of empty supermarket shelves and using the German phrase as a hashtag to comment on the trend. Hamsters love to hoard food in their cheek pouches, but with even pet food running out, there were concerns about the ramifications these stockpiling ‘Hamsters’ were doing to global supply chains.
CHICKEN INVESTOR
Cluck, cluck, cluck – here you have a Chicken Investor.
The challenge with these domesticated birds is that they are deathly afraid – of everything. And chicken investors approach the market with the same kind of trepidation. They cluck around with no particular plan. They are spooked by any kind of loss and fear easily overrides common sense. But this means they never stand a chance to make any type of gain.
We’ve seen that the bulls get paired with the bears; well for some reason (perhaps the farmyard proximity), the chickens often seem to get paired with pigs.
PIGS
Pigs unfortunately have a reputation for being very greedy and so a Pig is any investor who gets so overexcited by the thought of profits that they lose sight of their original investment strategy for all the dollar signs in their eyes.
Sadly, the dreamed-of gains rarely tumble into their laps. In fact, there is a saying on Wall Street: ‘Bulls make money, bears make money, pigs get slaughtered’.
PIGGY BANK
You might have had one of these in your childhood, for putting your spare change and pocket money in. In fact, the Piggy Bank has a very long history, going back to at least 1450. Before there were banks, people would stash their money at home in an earthenware pot called a ‘pygg’. This explains why potters in the nineteenth century fashioned Piggy Banks after this farmyard animal. Oink.
Originally Released On 17 August 2021