On bonds and bananas

In 1978, a time of globally high inflation, an American economics professor Alfred Kahn annoyed his boss by noting that a failure to get inflation under control would lead to a deep depression. Kahn’s boss at the time happened to be US President Jimmy Carter. Carter was not amused, and instructed Kahn never to use that word, or ‘recession’ ever again. Kahn, however, was a stickler for plain speaking and was not amused either. At the next press briefing, he used the word ‘banana’ instead of ‘recession’, saying that the US was “in danger of having the worst banana in 45 years”. When the banana industry objected to this terminology, he started using the word ‘kumquat’