It is without argument that the financial crisis changed America. It also changed the world’s economic landscape. It has now been about 10 years since the collapse of Lehman Brothers and since the forced buyout of Bear Stearns, and many former banks and financial institutions have vanished or been altered drastically. Even though the financial markets and economies have all by and large recovered from the financial crisis, there are still many deep scars that remain legacy issues and are clear and present today.

24/7 Wall St. recently featured eight major scars left over from and financial crisis and recession. It is important to not overlook these issues, because many of them almost undoubtedly will persist for many years ahead. One issue that changed drastically was the financial market vocabulary and terms used by the financial media each day.

The long and short of the matter is that a new financial vocabulary was created during and in the aftermath of the financial crisis. Some of the new economic and financial terms have been made up by governing officials. Some others seem as though they were pulled out of thin air.

Former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan was notorious for using terms in his testimonies and speeches that required dictionaries and scholars to interpret which exact definition he meant when speaking without explanation. Two peculiar terms used by Greenspan were “irrational exuberance” and “cupidity,” but the list was endless. And in the late 1990s, the term “Asian contagion” was used. These have all now faded with time.

Here are just some of the terms that the financial media have kept using over and over in the years since the financial crisis.

Quantitative easing. Going beyond mere interest rate cuts, this persists in 2018. It is when central banks have already taken interest rates down to zero or close to it but they have to keep coming up with creative ways to save their economy or financial system. The term “quantitative easing” is going to return every time there is even hint of a recession in the decades ahead.

Negative interest rates. Most lenders (debt buyers and owners) earn interest for lending. In today’s world outside of the United States, you might not make any money at all lending to a government. In Europe and Japan, debt investors often have to just be happy to let the government keep some of that money when they get paid back. This was never present in the modern pre-recession financial era.

Too big to fail. After the pain of seeing Lehman and Bear Stearns fall and the takeovers of Countrywide, Wachovia, WaMu and others, the nation’s top banks have become so large that if any single one of them were to fail then they could topple the entire financial world. The TBTF acronym is not used that much anymore, but the financial media now reference “too big to fail” every time there is even a hint of a disappointment.

Systemic risk. Similar to the notion of too big to fail, this term became synonymous with bailouts and was applied to many institutions in which the failure of one might cascade throughout larger and smaller banks and institutions alike.

Systemically important financial institutions (SIFI). This was not just about banks. General Electric, MetLife, Prudential and American International Group (AIG) all ended up on the list of SIFI names due to their importance. Most have since been removed from the list.

The Great Recession. This didn’t exactly feel so great. Our grandparents may have endured the Great Depression of the 1930s and into World War II, but there had never been anything worse than normal recessions from the 1950s until 2008. The last recession was so bad that they had to give it its own name. In all of its “greatness,” there was really nothing that felt positive while it was happening. Many people still have not recovered.

Algorithmic and machine trading. The term “black-box” trading had been used prior to the recession, but now most black-box trading is referred to as “the machines” and “algos” in the market. There has been an explosion in trading by machine, and now we are in a financial world with far fewer trading floors and trading pits. If they remain, they are run by a skeleton crew equal to a tiny portion of the people it used to be just two decades ago. Now the algos and machine trading, also aided by the massive expansion from exchange traded funds (ETFs), account for most of individual stock trading. Some estimates project that only 10% of equity trading in the United States is done by humans.

And several terms and acts have became synonymous with the bailouts and the post-recession world that still are used in reports to this day.

The U.S. Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). This was the funding the government invested into the banks and that was paid back directly by them. The government even made a profit — even if Warren Buffett received better terms when he invested directly into companies during or right after the Great Recession.

The PIIGS. It’s been a while since Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain have dominated the headlines as risks to pulling Europe (and further afield) back into the depths of recession. Still, nations like Turkey and elsewhere are compared to the PIIGS whenever financial contagion and trouble arise in the international market coverage.

Flash crash. In a world dominated by algos and machines, it’s no surprise that a garden variety market sell-off can get out of hand real quick. In 2010, there was a flash crash that took the market down almost 10% within minutes, and there was no news to explain it. There have been multiple instances in the years since when miniature versions of this have been seen, and the major exchanges have changed their limits on equities and have trading curbs that go into effect for the broader markets if the selling pressure reaches certain hurdles each day.

Some other terms were used before the recession, but on a very limited basis. For example, the term “subprime” was used before the recession, but it became the hallmark used routinely during and since then for those with poor credit.

The financial media also still uses terms such as “the next crisis” and “the next crash” routinely, despite the massive economic recovery and despite the instances of serious risks in 2018 paling in comparison to the 2006 to 2008 period. Imagine what media ratings would be like if you weren’t being scared and just heard: “It’s all good, carry on until you hear differently!”

There are literally an endless number of financial market terms that simply did not exist ahead of the financial crisis. Some may be more of an evolutionary development that would have occurred anyhow, but there are many financial market terms that exist now and will into the future that are directly as a result of the Great Recession.

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