WealthFinancial Buzzwords That Defined the Past 25 Years

Since our founding in 1999, Investopedia has been one of the most popular online sources of financial definitions, analysis, and advice for tens of millions of people every year. Our financial dictionary is the foundation on which this site was built, and it has given us a profound insight into what topics, terms, events, and technology define the financial world. For every major financial event, headline, trend, or development, we have a definition or explanation that millions of people turn to when they need trusted information.

In celebration of our 25th anniversary, we’re looking back to 1999 to revisit the most important terms of the past quarter century. These definitions offer a fascinating window into what has been on the minds of investors, consumers, and businesses over the last 25 years.

 

Cybersecurity

The year 1999 holds significant memories for many who lived through it. It marked the close of both the century and the millennium, an era characterized by Prince’s “Little Red Corvette,” Y2K, and, of course, the launch of Investopedia.

Many digital systems were not built to handle the numerical change from 1999 to 2000, causing widespread fear that our computing infrastructure would crash and be subject to vulnerabilities and cyber-terrorism.

The term “cybersecurity” was popularized as the end of the millennium loomed. As a result, some of the most important cybersecurity firms were launched. After all the build-up, no major cybersecurity issues—much less a full system crash—came to pass when midnight struck.

 

Broadband

The early days of the commercial internet were painfully slow and awkwardly loud. Who can forget the sound of a telephone modem dialing up an ISP (internet service provider)?

Broadband, a.k.a. high-speed internet, changed all that in the early 2000s. Telephone companies and communications startups spent billions of dollars building ADSL (asymmetric digital subscriber lines) that transmitted data at speeds of 512k per second—nine times faster than dial-up.

ADSL gave way to fiber-optic broadband and could transmit data at 30Mb per second—fast enough to watch feature films at the click of a mouse and trade stocks at lightning speeds, giving birth to high-frequency trading.

 

Bubble

This term has popped up many times over the past quarter century, but it really got frothy from late 1999 to 2001 during the dotcom days of irrational exuberance. The stock market was flooded with internet companies—or companies pretending to have an internet strategy—and Wall Street and Main Street investors rushed in. When the early money moved out, and many of these high-flying stocks were exposed for being long on promise but short on profits, the bubble burst and sent the Nasdaq down nearly 80% from its peak.

 

Insider Trading

The film Wall Street popularized the term “insider trading” in 1987, way before Investopedia’s time. Martha Stewart helped bring it back to the headlines in 2001 when she was implicated in an insider trading case involving ImClone, a pharmaceutical company that tried and failed to get FDA approval for an immunotherapy drug.

Stewart’s daughter Alexis was romantically involved with ImClone’s CEO, who allegedly tipped off the Stewarts to the bad news. They, along with other insiders, sold shares of the company before the news went public.

Even though the case surrounded insider trading, Martha Stewart was convicted in 2004 of lying about the stock sale, conspiracy, and obstruction of justice. She served five months in prison, five months of home confinement, and two years probation.

 

Bear Market

Given that a bear market—a 20% decline of an index from its most recent high—occurs on average every 3.6 years, this term has been very popular over the past twenty-five years.

The bear markets of 1999 to 2001 and 2008 to 2010 cut the stock market in half and washed away a lot of wealth and investor confidence with them. The bear market at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 was swift and painful, lasting only 33 days before the government stepped in with trillions of dollars in stimulus checks and lowered interest rates.

 

Ponzi Scheme

Ponzi schemes are as old as money but were named after Charles Ponzi, who ran one of the largest fraudulent investment schemes in the 1920s. Ponzi promised 50% returns on investments in international mail coupons.

In 2008, Bernie Madoff took the throne for running the largest Ponzi scheme in history, defrauding thousands of investors out of an estimated $65 billion over the course of at least 17 years.

 

Subprime

The core of the Great Financial Crisis was the homeownership boom at the turn of the century fueled by lenders making risky loans to subprime borrowers—those with poor to no credit history. Those subprime loans were then bundled into even riskier and more exotic financial products called collateralized debt obligations, from which synthetic collateralized debt obligations were born. When subprime homeowners defaulted on their mortgages, the whole house of cards came tumbling down, giving rise to the GFC.

 

Too Big To Fail

During the subprime crisis from 2006 to 2008, it became clear that the world’s largest banks were dangerously exposed to the loans they made to less-than-credit-worthy borrowers. The tens of billions of dollars of collateralized debt obligations the banks owned were now underwater due to plunging home prices and rising foreclosures. Storied financial institutions like Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns were at risk of bankruptcy as shareholders abandoned ship and debt-holders demanded their money.

To prevent a global financial meltdown, U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Fed Chair Ben Bernanke, along with other regulators and bank executives, created a plan to rescue key banks deemed “too big to fail.” This included the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), which involved the government buying over $400 billion in mortgage-backed securities and bank stocks in the largest financial bailout ever.

 

Great Financial Crisis

As The Fixx sings, “One thing leads to another…” and the subprime crisis quickly led to a global banking crisis, a recession that lasted from December of 2007 to June of 2009—the longest since World War II—and a bear market that erased more than half of the market value of the S&P 500. The Great Financial Crisis crippled the U.S. economy, costing nearly 9 million job losses, or an average of 700,000 per month. For millions of households and investors, the GFC left economic scars that are still visible today.

 

Dodd-Frank Act

One thing did indeed lead to another, and regulatory reform of the financial system soon followed the GFC with laws like the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which curtailed bank lending and mandated minimum capital requirements for lending institutions.

The Dodd-Frank Act also paved the way for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), a regulatory watchdog established to help consumers navigate their financial choices, take action against predatory companies and practices, and promote financial education.

 

Occupy Wall Street 

The wreckage of the GFC and the perception that the U.S. government bailed out the banks and lending institutions that helped create the crisis eventually turned into rage and protest.

The Occupy Wall Street movement was born and quickly spread through social media and civic protest as hundreds of people took over Zuccotti Park in downtown New York City in the heart of the financial district during the fall of 2011. Demanding reform and reining in bonuses and salaries for banking executives, the movement was one of the first major protests in the U.S. to use social media apps like Twitter and Facebook to organize and gain media attention.

 

Bitcoin

Even though the first Bitcoin was created or “mined” in 2009, the appeal and popularity of this decentralized cryptocurrency didn’t blossom until around 2014. A growing group of younger investors, disillusioned by the Great Financial Crisis, sought alternatives to traditional finance.

Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin, who still remains pseudonymous, invented the cryptocurrency as both a means of exchange and a tradable asset that would exist on a decentralized blockchain independent of the global banking system. By 2024, Bitcoin has become a much more widely held and traded asset among retail and institutional investors, with a market value of over $1 trillion.

Today, investors can access Bitcoin and other major cryptocurrencies through their 401(k)’s, brokerage accounts, trading platforms, and exchange-traded funds.

Affordable Care Act

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) is the comprehensive health care reform signed into law by then-President Barack Obama in March 2010. Formally known as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and commonly referred to as Obamacare, the law includes a list of healthcare policies intended to expand access to health insurance to millions of uninsured Americans.

The ACA expanded Medicaid eligibility, created a Health Insurance Marketplace, and prevented insurance companies from denying coverage due to preexisting conditions. Today, more than 21 million Americans have health insurance through the ACA.

 

ESG

As the impact of climate change became more evident and younger generations of investors cared more about the ethics and governance of the companies they invested in, the Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) investing theme took root across the financial services industry. Hundreds of new index funds and ETFs were launched, promising investors the ability to invest along with their beliefs. From 2014–2022, assets under management for ESG-related products worldwide doubled from around $15 trillion to $30 trillion.

Unfortunately, this rapid growth led many financial firms to label products as ESG despite lacking a genuine environmental, social, or governance focus.

 

Black Swan

A Black Swan is an unpredictable event that is beyond what is normally expected of a situation and has potentially severe consequences. They are characterized by their extreme rarity, severe impact, and the widespread insistence that they were obvious in hindsight.

Looking back 25 years, we’ve had a few Black Swan events, notably the Great Financial Crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic brought severe health, social, and economic consequences that we still live with today and proved how vulnerable we are to the unforeseen.

 

FAANG Stocks

CNBC’s Jim Cramer is often credited with coming up with the FANG acronym in 2013, which represented the stocks of Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google. They were four of the fastest-growing large-cap tech stocks at the time, and Cramer added Apple into the mix in 2017 and expanded FANG to FAANG. Those five stocks became so large and widely held that they dictated the direction of the market-weighted indexes like the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq. Luckily for investors, those stocks mostly kept on rising, driving the overall markets to new highs and padding the wealth of tens of millions of investors.

 

Racketeering

Racketeering broadly refers to criminal acts involving extortion or schemes to extract illegal profits that involve a “racket” or group of people. The 1970 Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) lists the federal crimes associated with racketeering. These crimes include bribery, fraud, gambling offenses, money laundering, financial and economic crimes, obstructing justice or a criminal investigation, and murder for hire.

Since racketeering crimes have such a wide purview and almost always involve money, it has become one of our most popular terms for the past quarter century, aided and abetted by racketeering charges leveled against Donald Trump, the Gambino crime family, FIFA, and Young Thug, among others.

 

SWIFT

If you’ve ever wondered how tap-to-pay on your phone or credit card swipes are processed so quickly, you have SWIFT to thank for that. The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT) system powers most international money and security transfers through a vast messaging network used by financial institutions to quickly, accurately, and securely send and receive information, such as money transfer instructions.

While the SWIFT system was formed in 1973 with 239 banks in 15 countries. By 2022, it had expanded to more than 11,000 institutional members from more than 200 countries and territories.

 

Brexit

Brexit is a portmanteau of “Britain” and “exit.” This geopolitical divorce dominated headlines worldwide as the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union in 2016, threatening to break up an economic and political alliance formed decades earlier. It took the U.K. four years to officially leave the European Union, which it formally did on January 31, 2020. Despite fears of economic chaos spreading through the region, Brexit came in like a lion but left like a lamb.

 

Inflation

Inflation measures the rise in prices of goods and services over time, and it has also been the dominant economic theme in the U.S. since the beginning of the recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021. A combination of trillions of dollars in stimulus funds and other government spending, combined with a shortage of goods, spiked the inflation rate to a multi-decade high of 8% in 2022, forcing the Federal Reserve to sharply raise interest rates to bring it down closer to its target of 2%.

While the pace of inflation has slowed, consumers are convinced that higher prices are here to stay.  We see them every time they go to the grocery store, book a plane ticket, buy insurance, or try to buy a home. This word will be in your active vocabulary for a while.

 

Meme Stocks

Every generation has its stock market mania; for the COVID era, it was meme stocks. A new generation of day traders embraced these highly speculative and highly shorted stocks like Gamestop and AMC Entertainment.

Stuck at home with stimulus checks in their accounts, day traders who used social media community platforms such as Reddit’s r/wallstreetbets to encourage one another to bid these stocks higher and hold on with “Diamond Hands” (never sell) to rake in some “Tendies” (profits). Meme stocks gave birth to this new trading vocabulary and popularized market sensations like Roaring Kitty and Dave Portnoy. And, like all stock manias, this one didn’t end well. Many meme stocks lost up to 90% of their value between 2021 and 2024.

 

Inverted Yield Curve

When the yield on long-term U.S. Treasury debt is less than the yield on short-term, it’s a signal that investors are pretty pessimistic about the near-term future of the economy and a pretty reliable harbinger of a recession.

At least, an inverted yield curve used to be a sign that a downturn was on its way. However, beginning in July 2022, the yield curve in U.S. Treasury bonds of various durations was inverted for over 650 days–the longest stretch on record–and there was no recession.

While an inverted yield curve may not be as reliable a signal of an economic downturn as it used to be, the dislocation in the U.S. Treasury market from investor expectations continues to fascinate.

 

Artificial Intelligence

The term “Artificial Intelligence” was originally coined in 1956 by Dartmouth College Professor John McCarthy. A.I., as it is commonly referred to, exploded into the investing universe in 2022 as the biggest companies in the world, such as Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, and Nvidia, devoted tens of billions of dollars of R&D money to using machine learning across their products and services.

Artificial intelligence has become a buzzword for supercomputing applications like data processing, machine learning, language models, and consumer-facing applications like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. It has also powered the stock market, especially the market-weighted S&P 500 and the Nasdaq, to record highs, as the biggest companies in those indexes are worth trillions of dollars as investors bet on the promise of this developing technology.

 

Tariffs

Tariffs are as old as global trade and have been used by economies for centuries as a carrot and a stick. But the practice of raising fees on imports took on a whole new tone when Donald Trump was elected president in 2016. His administration imposed over $300 billion in tariffs against China and the E.U.

The Biden administration kept many of those tariffs in place and added a few more around semiconductor imports. As the 2024 presidential election approaches, tariffs are back in the spotlight as the former president has vowed to raise tariffs across the board if elected.

 

American Dream

The term “American Dream” is much older than Investopedia. It was originally coined by American historian and writer James Truslow Adams in his 1931 book The Epic of America. But this has been one of the most popular and controversial terms on our site for many years as the notion of achieving the so-called American Dream—earning enough money to afford to raise a family, educate your kids, afford a home, save enough for a comfortable retirement, and take a few vacations—seems harder for more and more people.