Topic: Financial terms of 1929 & 1930

The stock market drop—or plunge, really—on this date in 1929 is generally credited (or debited) with starting the Great Depression.

Appropriately enough, 1929 witnessed the print debut of the terms debt service and overbought. But the stock market crash occurred in the latter part of that year, and plenty more terms associated with a sinking economy came along in the years that followed. Let's look at a few from 1930.

That was the year of the adjective Mickey Mouse (meaning "worthless;" or "trite"), and it was also the year of the verbs bail out and downgrade. 1930 saw the first occurrences of bathtub gin and efficiency apartment, and it witnessed the birth of hyperinflation and the means test (for determining eligibility for public assistance).

We were startled to learn another financial term much in the news in 2007 also dates back to 1930: tranche. The noun tranche was borrowed into English from French, where it literally means "slice." In English, tranche names "a division or portion of a pool or whole;" as modern moneywatchers know, tranche also has a more specific sense naming "an issue of bonds derived from a pooling of like obligations, such as securitized mortgage debt, that is differentiated from other issues, especially by maturity or rate of return."

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