Financial buzzwords of 2010 came from crisis situations

Every crisis need not necessarily have a silver lining, but based on the trend witnessed in the year 2010, it is clear such situations are the most likely to create buzzwords out of otherwise unheard of financial jargon.

The year 2010 will be remembered for the various scams and crisis situations that thrust little-known words and phrases like 'sweat equity', 'overlays' and '2G spectrum' into the limelight, forcing people to look up their meanings.

The controversy surrounding the IPL cricket tournament pushed the term 'sweat equity' into newspaper headlines, which cost Minister of State for External Affairs Shashi Tharoor his job after it was alleged that Sunanda Pushkar, now his wife, was given 'sweat equity' in a team.

'Sweat equity' refers to stake given to a company executive in return for the services and value added or to be added to the company's operations.

Similarly, 'overlays' came to the limelight in the wake of an alleged scam perpetrated by the organisers of the Commonwealth Games (CWG) hosted by the country in October, 2010.

It was alleged that a scam worth hundreds of crore was essayed by the CWG organisers by hiking the cost of various 'overlays' or temporary infrastructure facilities, such as treadmills, chairs and refrigerators, to be used by the visiting athletes.

The biggest of all the scams, the alleged irregularities in the allocation of '2G spectrum', left many pondering over the meaning of both the alpha-numeric acronym as well as the word straight out of a physics book.

While there are millions of mobile users in the country, not many may know that their handsets use '2G' or second-generation mobile technology for calls to get connected using spectrum, which is the technical term used to describe a band of radio frequencies.

Not long ago, financial jargon such as MTM (Mark-to-Market), CDS (Credit Default Swap), credit crunch and recession became almost household names after the global financial crisis in 2008.

Taking forward the trend, economists and financial market experts in 2010 churned out terms like 'green shoots', 'yellow weeds' and even 'brown manure' -- all three to define the state of world economies recovering from the worst financial crisis in many decades.

However, there was a discernible change in the methodology of coining terms in 2010, when keeping it simple emerged as the way to go and most of the exotic-sounding, but complex, theories were shot down in the world of business.

Furthermore, the new financial jargon that made its way into the public's vocabulary was far and few between in 2010, compared to the period till mid-2008 and, to some extent, in 2009 as well.