If the Doges of Wall Street and Greenwich, Connecticut, are not the Masters of the Universe Tom Wolfe dubbed them at about the time they led the United States into the savings and loan debacle, they have at least had the power to free themselves of almost all regulatory restraint. In the process, they have caused two more financial crises, which have brought America to a precarious, trembling balance on the edge of catastrophe.

"The economy is fundamentally sound," or "The worst is behind us," or "We've hit the bottom, and it's uphill from now on" : Head for the hills.

Fair Disclosure Rule : A government rule requiring a company to make information about its prospects available to the larger investing public and Wall Street stock analysts at the same time.

The rule is part of the never-ending effort to prevent people from cashing in on exclusive information. Since successful stock-picking is impossible without secret inside information, you may be sure the cheaters are finding new forms of unfair advantage even as you read this.

Form 4506T : The IRS form to be signed by home buyers giving mortgage lenders the authority to look at the buyers' income tax returns to verify their income and make sure they can afford the mortgage. Had form 4506T been used by lenders during the housing boom, there would have been a much smaller housing bubble and therefore a smaller crash. Law enforcement agencies are investigating why lenders did not ascertain the credit-worthiness of borrowers and whether the failure to do so constitutes fraud and/or actionable negligence.

Liquidity Put : This is a promise by a firm selling a CDO (for which see above) or MBO (see below) to repurchase an item in case the buyer cannot sell it to somebody else for the original purchase price.

Originally the idea for securitizing or bundling mortgage or other debt into bonds and then selling the bonds was that if enough were sold to a broad enough spectrum of people, the risk would be spread so far and so thin that a lot of people would get nicked for a little loss, but nobody would get seriously hurt, if home buyers welched on their payments.

With liquidity puts, the risk really is not spread around--it remains with the sellers. And now the investment banks that did the selling are on the hook for billions of bucks.

Why would they do something that looks, in the light of what has happened, so dumb even a Wall Streeter should have known better? The answer probably is that they were so greedy for sales they threw in the repurchase promise confident that they had all the angles figured so perfectly that they could not get burned.

Mortgage-Backed Security (MBO) : Akin to CDOs are MBOs, many of which, of late, are emitting a decidedly unpleasant odor.

Ninja Loan : This has nothing to do with black-clad fighters of fourteenth-century Japan. They were sometimes rash but never as idiotically greedy as the modern mortgage brokers who made such loans, meaning mortgages given to people with no income, no job and no assets.

Punch Bowl : A metaphor for easy money and the inflation, speculation, unemployment and hard times easy money brings in its wake.

William McChesney Martin, the Eisenhower- and Kennedy-era chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, is remembered for saying that the Fed must "take away the punch bowl just as the party gets going." He meant sucking money out of the economy when too much of it is starting to blow bubbles, à la Alan Greenspan's technology bubble of 2000 and his real estate bubble of 2003-07, a bubble so large it defied the laws of physics.

During most of Martin's time the dollar was worth 100 cents and a prosperous and growing nation was spared the roller-coaster, boom-and-bust economics that have become the norm since he left office. In the end, Martin gave in to political pressure from the White House to pay for the Vietnam War; he left office in 1970 with inflation at a ruinous 6 percent and rising by the minute.

Recession : The word may have come into use around 1929 as a euphemism for the harsher "panic," the nineteenth-century term for when the arrows on the graphs start moving south.