Fretted and harried by the constancy of the crunch, I decided to investigate the origins of the most famous phrase in the world ...
The sense of ‘crunch,’ as a crisis or a critical moment, was popularised by Winston Churchill with his first recorded use of it in 1939. The term 'credit crunch’ first appeared in the late 1960s in reference to a Wall Street crisis. Prior to 1966, the United States endured three periods of tight credit: the spring of 1953, the autumn of 1957, and the final third of 1959. These spells were called ‘credit pinches’ or ‘credit squeezes.’ In the summer 1966, when American borrowers were struggling to obtain credit at any price, Sidney Homer and Henry Kaufmann, economists at Salomon Brothers, coined the term ‘crunch’ to differentiate between the credit problems in the 1950s and what was happening that particular year. It was used only occasionally over the next forty years until the middle of 2007 when it became the phrase on everyone’s lips. It has now been added to the Concise Oxford English Dictionary.
...with any luck, there will be a time, before the end of it all, when we can get through a day again without hearing someone saying ... it.
© Seren Lloyd 2008
10th December 08
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