Budget - A hurdle to be jumped.

Crisis - Somebody big and institutional has been bungling beyond repair.

Deadline - Made out of rubber.

Economic Theory - Feelings hidden behind formula.

Futures - For people who prefer to lose slowly.

Greed - The craving for power and possession, less irksome than sex, but more persistent and more difficult to satisfy.

Hedging - Whoever can afford it, feels comfortable with inflation.

Inflation - Spending more than producing on a national scale; a purely moral question.

Justice - How to do it to one party without withholding it from the other; one of the delicate problems of mankind.

Keynes - If government spends more than it has, people will take a long time to notice and to suffer the consequences.

Law - The substitution of sword-play by word-play.

Marxism - Third chapter in the history of exhortations: first the devil, then sex, now capital.

Networth - Depending on temperament and the situation, financial genius moves between the extremes of take-it-and-run and don't-touch-it-to-let-it-grow.

Organization man - Has two jobs, doing some work and making a career.

Paradise - To be reinstalled by consumer credit; another expulsion is unavoidable.

Quotient - Mostly used in the connection I.Q., intelligence quotient, where the amount of information is divided by age; computers win, Buddha loses.

Retirement - To give hitherto successful individuals an opportunity to find out for themselves how difficult they are to live with.

Statistics - As illustrative of the past, as misleading for the future.

Taxation - As applied to productive endeavor and the results thereof a living proof of the utter imbecility and immorality of the modern State.

Underwriting - Built on the assumption that if somebody jumps into ice-cold water somebody else will be fool enough to follow him.

Value - Exchanging a smaller one against a bigger one is not a principle of capitalism but of life itself; e.g. making the effort of breathing to get oxygen into one's system.

Wealth - Easier lost than poverty; therefore, so much more of a nerve-racking proposition.

XXX-rated - Not for thrice dirty movies, but for public projects with three unknown variables, to wit, time of termination, total cost, and eventual social-economic return.

Youth - A condition where, contrary to historical evidence, one believes in virtue rewarded, constant love, unmarred happiness, freedom, progress, and a satisfactory income.

Zero-Sum-Society - Just keep it going until it turns negative altogether.