by the Night Writer

(from boing-boing)

Nancy features the word “zombie” in her Word for the Week on Fritinancy, and offers an entertaining history of the origin and uses of the word as well, of course, as its place in our entertainment and culture. Included in this is the following punditry she’s come across recently:

But it’s the ongoing global financial crisis that has truly reanimated “zombie.” References to zombie banks and zombie companies have proliferated over the last 12 months. “The threat of zombies here and now is real,” wrote Alyce Lomax in the Motley Fool blog last week:

That is, the zombie banks and zombie corporations that are artificially kept alive even though in any rational, natural world they should be dead. And if these reanimated corpses are still stumbling around, growing greater and greater in number, well, I’m pretty sure we all know what appears to be causing the dead to rise.

In a Jan. 18 column titled “Wall Street Voodoo,” New York Times op-ed columnist and Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman wrote about a hypothetical bank, “Gothamgroup”:

On paper, Gotham has $2 trillion in assets and $1.9 trillion in liabilities, so that it has a net worth of $100 billion. But a substantial fraction of its assets — say, $400 billion worth — are mortgage-backed securities and other toxic waste. If the bank tried to sell these assets, it would get no more than $200 billion.

So Gotham is a zombie bank: it’s still operating, but the reality is that it has already gone bust. Its stock isn’t totally worthless — it still has a market capitalization of $20 billion — but that value is entirely based on the hope that shareholders will be rescued by a government bailout.

I think in these cases the zombies are roaming the streets moaning for “Brains!” not because they want to eat them but because they seem to have misplaced them. This does give me an excuse to link to a classic from Tiger Lilly, however:

(Finally, the Are You Smarter Than a Fifth-Grader-level trivia question: What movie did the headline of this post come from? Hint: it wasn’t a zombie film.)

Update:

To find out what the zombies don’t want you to know (i.e., who you’re really borrowing from) go here. (HT: Through the Illusion).