Financial Buzzwords That Defined the Past 25 Years

Discover the phrases that shaped the last quarter-century.

Fact checked by Suzanne Kvilhaug
Reviewed by Katie Miller

Since its founding in 1999, Investopedia has been an online source of financial definitions, analysis, and advice. The site’s financial dictionary includes topics, terms, events, and technology that define the financial world. To celebrate Investopedia’s 25th anniversary, we looked back to 1999 to revisit the most important terms.

Cybersecurity

1999 marked the close of the century and the millennium, an era characterized by Prince’s “Little Red Corvette,” Y2K, and the launch of Investopedia. Many feared digital systems would not handle the numerical change from 1999 to 2000 and the infrastructure would experience interference or collapse. The term “cybersecurity” was defined as companies secured data and technology.

Broadband

The early days of the commercial internet included the sound of a telephone modem dialing up an ISP (internet service provider). Luckily, broadband, a.k.a. high-speed internet, appeared in the early 2000s.

Telephone companies and communications startups built 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.

Bubble

This term is synonymous with the Dotcom days of irrational exuberance when the stock market was flooded with internet companies in the late 1990s—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 fell 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. 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. 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 wealth and investor confidence. The bear market at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 was swift and painful, lasting only 33 days.

Ponzi Scheme

Ponzi schemes 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 ran the largest Ponzi scheme in history, defrauding thousands of investors an estimated $65 billion over 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 or no credit history. Subprime loans were then bundled into risky financial products called collateralized debt obligations, from which synthetic collateralized debt obligations were born.

Important

Investopedia celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2024 and looked back to see what’s changed, emerged, and shaped today’s financial ecosystem and your finances. Learn more here. 

Too Big To Fail

During the subprime crisis from 2006 to 2008, the world’s largest banks were dangerously exposed to the loans they made to less-than-credit-worthy borrowers. The collateralized debt obligations the banks owned were 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. 

U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, Fed Chair Ben Bernanke, 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) where the government bought over $400 billion in mortgage-backed securities and bank stocks in the largest financial bailout.

Great Financial Crisis

A recession lasted from December 2007 to June 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.

Dodd-Frank Act

Regulatory reform followed the crisis of 2008-2009 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 created 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 Occupy Wall Street movement was born and quickly spread through social media and civic protest when people took over Zuccotti Park in New York City in the heart of the financial district in 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.

Creator Satoshi Nakamoto remains pseudonymous. Cryptocurrency was invented as a means of exchange and a tradable asset on a decentralized blockchain independent of the global banking system. By 2024, Bitcoin was a widely held and traded asset among retail and institutional investors. 

Note

In 2009, the first recorded value of one Bitcoin was $0.009. As of Feb. 2025, one Bitcoin traded over $99.000, and those long-time holders have created a name for their loyalty: HODL (Hold on for Dear Life).

Affordable Care Act

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) is the comprehensive health care reform signed into law by President Barack Obama in March 2010. 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.

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, Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) investing took root across the financial services industry. New index funds and ETFs were launched. From 2014–2022, assets under management for ESG-related products worldwide doubled from around $15 trillion to $30 trillion. 

Black Swan

A Black Swan is an unpredictable event beyond what is normally expected of a situation with potentially severe consequences like the Great Financial Crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic.

FAANG Stocks

The FANG acronym represents the stocks of Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google. They were four of the fastest-growing large-cap tech stocks in 2013, and CNBC’s Jim Cramer added Apple into the mix in 2017 and expanded FANG to FAANG. They dictated the direction of the market-weighted indexes like the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq.

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. Racketeering charges have been leveled against Donald Trump, the Gambino crime family, FIFA, and Young Thug, among others.

SWIFT

Financial institutions use the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT) system to quickly, accurately, and securely send and receive information. 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. In 2022, the U.S., U.K., and the E.U. disconnected seven Russian banks from the SWIFT network as sanctions in response to the war in Ukraine. 

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 was the dominant economic theme in the U.S. during 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%. 

Meme Stocks

A new generation of day traders embraced meme stocks or speculative and shorted stocks like Gamestop and AMC Entertainment.  Day traders 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. 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, investors are pessimistic about the near-term future of the economy and a pretty reliable harbinger of a recession. 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. 

Artificial Intelligence

The term “Artificial Intelligence” was originally coined in 1956 by Dartmouth College Professor John McCarthy. A.I. exploded into the investing universe in 2022 as Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, and Nvidia, devoted R&D money to using machine learning across their products and services. 

Artificial intelligence is a buzzword for data processing, machine learning, language models, and consumer-facing applications like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.

Tariffs

Tariffs are part of global trade and include raising fees on imports. After his election in 2016, President Donald Trump 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. In 2025, President Trump began his tenure with new tariff proposals on Mexico, Canada, and China.

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.

This has been one of the most popular and controversial terms on our site for many years as Investopedia has tried to provide readers with information to achieve the so-called American Dream—earning enough money to afford to raise a family, educate kids, afford a home, save enough for a comfortable retirement, and take a few vacations.