Numbers dressed up in fancy suits pretending to be words.
An account that offsets another account on the balance sheet, like accumulated depreciation playing bad cop to your asset's good cop. It reduces the value of the related account without actually touching it.
A provision requiring executives to return compensation if certain conditions aren't met or if it was based on fraudulent numbers. It's the corporate version of 'give that back right now.'
Loans with few or no maintenance covenants that would normally protect lenders, essentially trusting borrowers to be responsible without supervision. It's the financial equivalent of lending your car to a teenager with no curfew.
Selectively choosing favorable data points while ignoring unfavorable ones, or choosing which trades to allocate to which accounts after seeing results. It's the art of making anything look good through strategic omission.
The stuff you promise to forfeit if you can't pay back a loan—basically insurance for lenders who don't trust your word alone. It's the financial equivalent of leaving your driver's license at the bowling alley when you rent shoes. Can be your house, car, or collection of vintage Beanie Babies (though banks prefer the first two).
Basic goods traded in bulk markets where one unit is virtually identical to another—think oil, wheat, gold, or coffee beans before they get a fancy name at Starbucks. These fungible raw materials are bought and sold on specialized exchanges where traders gamble on price fluctuations. It's where agricultural products and natural resources become abstract financial instruments.
The direct costs of producing goods or services that were actually sold, abbreviated as COGS. It includes materials and labor but not the CEO's golf club membership, no matter how insistently he argues it's 'client development.'
A comprehensive listing of all accounts in an organization's general ledger, organized into categories like assets, liabilities, and expenses. It's the financial filing system that makes sense to exactly one person: whoever designed it.
Short for cryptocurrency, the digital money that exists entirely in the cloud and whose value fluctuates more wildly than your mood on a Monday morning. It's either the future of finance or the world's most elaborate Ponzi scheme, depending on whether you bought Bitcoin at $100 or $60,000. Also refers to cryptography, the actual useful technology that crypto enthusiasts sometimes remember exists.
Information barriers within financial institutions designed to prevent conflicts of interest, like keeping the investment banking side from sharing insider information with the trading desk. Also increasingly called 'ethical walls' because geography.
The art of making numbers tell whatever story you want them to tell, staying just barely on the legal side of fraud. It's lying with spreadsheets and a CPA license.
The original purchase price of an asset used to calculate capital gains taxes, proving that the IRS wants documentation of every financial decision you've ever made. Lose track of it and prepare for tax-time panic.
An insurance contract against a borrower defaulting on debt, except it's called a 'swap' instead of insurance to avoid pesky insurance regulations. The financial instrument that nearly destroyed the global economy in 2008.
Abbreviated slang for cryptocurrency, used by people too busy day-trading Dogecoin to type out the full word. It's the linguistic equivalent of buying low and selling lower while pretending you understand blockchain technology.
A bank's capital expressed as a percentage of its risk-weighted assets, essentially measuring whether a financial institution has enough cushion to survive its own bad decisions. Regulators love it; bank executives pretend to.