A little over a year ago, I invited readers to suggest names for this financial crisis we (still) find ourselves in. Despite getting lots of great suggestions here and elsewhere, I never pulled the trigger and picked a winner. I was probably right not to do so—I was looking not so much for the funniest name as for one that might stick, and given that no one name has stuck yet it probably would have been way premature to pick one in March 2008.
Still, that’s no way to run a contest. Yet I did it again with my rename-the-TARP contest. Lots of fine suggestions here, at Swampland, and from my Facebook friends. My excuse here is that, after we thought about for a while, Barbara and I decided that Geithner’s own choice, the “Financial Stability Plan,” was genius—it’s boring, but it doesn’t lend itself to embarrassing acronymizing, and if Treasury could get reporters to start referring to the plan by its full name, it would be a work of Orwellian genius (the latter hasn’t really happened, but neither has anybody found any unflattering new acronyms to throw around. Other than “TARP 2,” which probably couldn’t have been prevented.)
Again, I had my reasons, but that’s no way to run a contest. Which brings me to my worst performance of all: November’s My book needs a subtitle. Can you help? I got 38 suggestions here, 18 more at Ezra’s place, and dozens more on Facebook. Many of them were serious. All of were appreciated. But my book editor looked through a bunch of them and decided to stick with the subtitle he’d written: “A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street.” Which isn’t bad at all. It looks good on a book cover (this is a mockup, the real thing goes on sale in June):
Still, no way to run a contest. And since I had promised a copy of the book to the winner, I figured I should pick one anyway. And the free book goes to rrsafety, for this brilliantly archaic suggestion:
THE MYTH OF THE RATIONAL MARKET
or
WHY THE WALL STREET CROWD ISN’T AS SMART AS YOU THINK
in which
The Methods of Market Dynamics are deduced from their ORIGINALS,
and
ILLUSTRATED in their DIFFERENT SIGNIFICATIONS
by
EXAMPLES of there INEXACTABILITY.
To which are prefixed,
A HISTORY of MARKETS,
and AN OVERVIEW OF DYNAMICS THEREUPON.
By Justin Fox, A.B.
In One Volume
VOL. I