Macroprudential

Macroprudential.  That's a word most of us don't use very often, or even knew before last week.  In a sense, "macroprudential" is the current Federal Reserve chairman's bookend to "irrational exuberance," coined by his predecessor on December 5, 1996.  Irrational exuberance expressed Greenspan's concern about what led to the current financial crisis (which, by the way, isn't over yet, don't kid yourself) and Bernanke is using it to describe what the federal government is doing to prevent more trouble -- regulating with an eye to possible effects on the entire financial system (macroprudential regulation), in contrast to simply looking at whether a particular institution might have problems or fail (microprudential regulation). 

"Stop," says Virginia.  "That's all we need to know."

She's right.  That's all you'll read here about it.

It's interesting to think about words and expressions we know today that we didn't know 20 or 10 years ago.  A lot of tech words come to mind, these are easy to think of -- camcorder, CD, flash drive, boot, email, DAT, download, upload, MIDI, cellphone, text message.

Reaching a little bit -- s/he, what's her face, foodie, localvore, Jazzercise, muggle, blamestorming, gaydar, grrrl, threequel, frankenfood.

And with the recent revival of Ayn Rand, "Who is John Galt?"  (character in Atlas Shrugged)

This reminds me of a children's book I wish I'd written -- "The Frindle" by Andrew Clements, with its main character, a fifth grader named Nicholas Allen.