Duckie Dic - World Financial Dictionary

Stop SOPA/PIPA

2012-01-18T10:29:00.000-08:00

What the Heck is a Petrie Dish?

2011-12-30T14:41:00.000-08:00

Petrie (pee tree) Dish (dish, dummy)

This is a small glass dish that gets filled with some kind of gooey jelly stuff, then put in a warm place where a "culture" is grown. Most commonly used to grow the creatures who sit in boardrooms and say...

"Well, what we're doing here is not actually illegal."

Duckie

Why Do They Say Power is an Aphrodisiac?

2011-11-08T12:26:00.000-08:00

BGD "Fluffy"

Thanks for the question, anonymous reader. Here is a direct quote from a nearly reliable source* in the banking lobby:
"Power is an Aphrodisiac is a polite-company way of saying if a politician or banker can't get any action from anybody but a bimbo gold digger, he might as well screw the public."

*source iaap.tbws+

Photo: © Eric Simard: BigstockPhoto.com

+iaap.tbws (It's All About Power) is a fictitious website. Unlike the other fictitious websites in our family, iaap.tbws does not exist. (at least as of the time of this writing)

What is the Difference Between a Dead Duck and A Dead Duckie

2011-11-02T13:19:00.000-07:00

A dead duck is a stinky animal. A dead Duckie would ruin my day.
*ok, so there aren't really any zombie ducks in this article, I just got carried away with Halloween just being over.

Digress

2011-07-08T09:05:00.000-07:00

v. 1) skirt the issue, 2) lose track of the issue because of someone's short skirt, 3) make shit up because you can't remember the lie you told last time

e.g. "I couldn't follow what that sumbitch was sayin' because he digressed so much from what the hell he was supposed to be talkin' about."

[ed: kind of like a derivative, but not exactly, ok maybe not even close, but it does begin with the same letter]

Text Speak: LOL?

2010-06-25T09:41:00.000-07:00

What a woman does when she sees the owner of a 400-foot yacht - naked.

e.g. Compensate, v. why a wealthy man who women laugh at when he's naked buys a 400-foot yacht.

The United States Congress

2010-05-01T07:59:00.000-07:00

With all the confusion, partisan posturing, infidelity, graft, corruption, and other outlandishly fun activities going on in Congress, many of our readers wanted to know what Congress really means.

Noun.

The United States Congress is simply a group of 445 high-testosterone human males comparing dicks in front of 90 women (some of whom wish they had dicks to compare.)

Get in Line Fast Fellas!

2010-01-09T15:54:00.000-08:00

Bankers across the country are queued up (see image at left) to collect their 2009 bonus checks before the hicks in Flyover Country have a chance to do the math.

What's the bonus total this year? $50 billion? $60 billion? One of the majors alone has set aside $22 billion --- YES THAT'S A FREAKIN' B! for compensation for executive and other 'players' (to an average tune of $536,000 according to the New York Times).

OK, we'll be nice guys here and play it conservative. We'll call the total for the top ten around $80 BILLION BUCKS (which we really think is about 60% - 70% of what the actual total will be.)

What can $80 billion buy this day and age?

Well, lessee...

The TOTAL budget for the State of California (population 56 gazillion) is only $82.9 billion. The whole schmear. Of course they're light about $6.9 jumbo, but maybe a couple of these bankers could give them nice little personal loans at, what, 23%?

Hmm... or $80 billion could bring a MILLION unemployed people back to work for a year with a total comp package (including health insurance) around $80,000 per.

How about cities? How about EIGHTY cities the size of Denver, Colorado?

Or a year's college tuition for 3,200,000 (yes that's 3.2 million) students.

These bankers are whining that they have to pay out this kind of money to retain quality people and a competitive edge.

How much talent does it take to say, "just jack up the monthly fees on the credit cards, charge people a fee if they don't buy enough on credit, and generally screw our customers any way we can..." (watch for the caca coming down the pike in February, and make DAMNED SURE you're reading the fine print in ANYTHING you get from your bank or credit card company.

'nuf said.

It's Quite Complicated, You See

2010-01-02T10:13:00.000-08:00

"It's Quite Complicated, You See" is a common phrase used to blow smoke up the listener's arse in the following situations:

You could, of course, dump your dollars and pounds for gold in offshore accounts, but of course it's quite complicated, you see, to understand exactly how it all works.

Things would be a lot better of for all of us if American and Western European workers would be willing to take the same wages as, say, any other freakin' place in the world, but it's quite complicated, you see, to get them all to do that.

When we want to steal people blind with market manipulations, misstated revenues, under-reported expenses, and the like, we just tell them it's quite complicated, you see, far beyond your capability to understand.

Banking Holiday

2009-12-28T06:48:00.001-08:00

n. (US,UK) Designated days during the year where bankers are given time off to fly huge amounts of currency out of the country, and can work on their "recordkeeping" without customers and regulators about.

The Man - Monster Truck Equation

2009-09-16T08:31:00.000-07:00

This scientific equation is developed through research done over a period of years on the nation's highways, while bouncing One's (One being the researcher) field of vision between the road ahead and the rear view mirrors.

(SUV)m³∞>len(pp) = d(SUV-OFBB) ~ len(pp)

Layman's translation:

The size of a Man's Truck is INVERSELY PROPORTIONAL to the size of the body part which allows him to pee standing up.

At the same time, the distance between the Man's Truck and the Back Bumper of One's research vehicle decreases rapidly until it approaches the length of aforementioned body part.

More simply, size does matter.

MAD Triad

2009-08-09T12:37:00.000-07:00

The MAD Triad consists of three activities that allow people at the top of corporations to suck out resources, often in a way that is completely tax-deductible to the corporation. Each of the three components to the MAD Triad are discussed individually in this dictionary. The three (why is it that EVIL crapola always comes in threes? -- Axis of Evil e.g.) are:

Merger
Acquisition
Dissolution

Dic

2009-08-08T09:13:00.000-07:00

abbv. a widely-used (OK, so nobody really uses it but us) abbreviation for the word dictionary.

As in:

Q: Tell us, Duckie, does the word Dic in the heading of your dictionary site have any hidden meanings? We're very concerned that it might be one of those double-entendre things. Isn't the usual abbreviation for dictionary dict?

A: Duckie can't help it if your mind is feeding you twisted, perverted information. If Duckie wanted to use one of those double-entendre things, he would have called it Duckie's Private Dick, or Duckie's Moby Dick... something like that.

You want to know why we left of the T? Two reasons: One, it didn't fit in the header without shrinking the font or shrinking Duckie's head. Two, certain people, like maybe you, would always be wondering... "Is that a silent T like those French guys have sometimes?"

Cayman

2009-08-08T08:53:00.000-07:00

n. a place like Switzerland, only warmer, where drug dealers, investment bankers, and other low-life can squirrel away ill gotten gains without having to worry about things like disclosure or taxes.

As in:

Way back in the 16 or 17 hundreds, before Disney started making records, the Governor of the BWI (British West Indies) looked at the Cayman Islands. "Man, you can't grow crap here, not even Ganja like in Jamaica. How about if we build banks -- the tax free kind? We can hide all kinds of stuff from the King and then in the future, when the Americans have 401(k) plans, we can take a cut when our cousins swindle them away."

n. an entry-level German car.

As in:

The bonus Eddie got for screwing 100 people out of the money in their 1031 accounts wasn't enough for a Carrera 4, so he bought the aqua blue metallic Cayman.

v. to bundle large quantities of U.S. $100 bills in shrink-wrapped bails and transport them via private jet to the Cayman Islands for tax-free deposits.

As in:

When the second assistant to the head guy at Banco de Puerco heard that the SEC and Federal Reserve were breathing down his neck, he decided to Cayman the $112 million in cash he had been keeping in a vault in his Connecticut basement.

Remodel

2009-08-07T08:04:00.000-07:00

Remodel:
v. 1) to renovate an existing office, commercial building, or residence for the purpose of updating capabilities, enhancing occupant safety and comfort, or just to make it cooler than the ice on a polar bear's nuts.

As in:
The $6,000 shower curtain, and $30,000 toilet were only a tiny parts of the project to remodel the CEO's multi-million dollar Manhattan condo, paid for, of course, by the company as an executive perk.

or as in:
The Member of Parliament (MP) brushed off questions from reporters regarding the more than 20,000 Pounds (happily provided by British taxpayers) spent to remodel his apartment.

v. 2) to adjust a regulation or public policy to bring greater benefit to those doing the "remodeling"

As in:

Beginning in the 1980s and continuing through two Bush administrations, government officials remodeled regulatory agencies to allow billions of taxpayer and investor dollars to be siphoned off by financial and corporate executives without any oversight or control.

Why They Have Good Chinese Food in Austria

2009-08-06T10:59:00.000-07:00

OK, so this isn't exactly financial, but Austria is next to Switzerland so it is sort of pertinent.

I just figured out that they probably have pretty good Chinese food in Austria -- in addition to the beer and strudel, of course.

How did I come to this conclusion?

Well first, you know of course that Austria isn't really Austria in Austria. Austria is only Austria outside of Austria. Inside of Austria, Austria is Osterreich! And you know that that means.

Oh, you don't?

Well then--let's take a look. We're going to loosely (Duckie does everything loosely) translate Osterreich into American (as in San Jose, not Gonads, Oklahoma) English:

Ost = East
Reich = Empire (think Third Reich, Thousand Year Reich) - OK, it really means reach, but we're going to say Empire.
Just throw away the "er" in between.

So now you've got East Empire. Well, then. The Soviet Union is no more (just ex-generals selling nukes and trading satellite access codes to NFWTV™ for a Mercedes S Class, a condo in Hollywood, Florida and a case of Johnny Walker Black™.) The middle east is, well, the middle east. Not really East and not much of an empire if you know what I mean. That leaves freakin' China.

In other words, Austria is the China of the EU. Ergo -- good Chinese food.

(Although I am thinking that the Chinese food on the south end of Manhattan is probably better than anything in China. Oh well, at least the rice doesn't have rocks in it like it does in North Korea.)

Put that in your Poo-Poo Platter.

Duckie
(filed under A for Austria)

Swiss

2009-08-05T16:24:00.000-07:00

n. a little guy with a mustache who used to make watches or cheese and has a reputation for never getting conquered -- so figured his place (called Switzerland instead of Swissland for some reason) would be a good place to store other people's money -- for a fee of course -- and keep it secret -- for a bigger fee of course

As in:
In the 1930s and 1940s, Hermann Goering and other Nazi thugs (excuse me, National Socialist heroes of the Fatherland) shipped trains full of confiscated fine art, precious metals, and other treasures to Swiss banks for safekeeping until the eventual glorious victory of the Thousand Year Reich.

or as in:

In the early 21st century, leaders of Banco de Puerco and other banking scum (excuse me, financial wizards who truly understood the monetary 'games' that were far to complex for the 'flyover people') transferred billions in assets to personal Swiss accounts in the midst of a nearly trillion dollar government bailout. The Swiss government, in turn, threatened criminal action against any Swiss bank that divulged deposit information regarding these billions to the SEC, Federal Reserve, or other investigative or regulatory bodies.

Derivative

2009-08-05T16:21:00.000-07:00

n. highly addictive complex narcotic, which often results in ego inflation, loss of reality, and hoarding syndrome; grown worldwide, but most prevalent in Manhattan, London, Zurich, Beijing and Hong Kong.

As in:

A home builder and a mortgage banker were chatting in the waiting room at the Chicken Ranch in Nevada. The home builder seemed exceptionally morose for the circumstances and the banker asked him why.
"Can't sell all the freakin' houses I'm building."
"You could lower prices," the banker said.
"What? And give up the Ferrari? There's got to be a way we can get more people into houses."
"How about a derivative?"
"What's a freakin' derivative."
"It's kind of a money game. We invent a loan that everybody can afford, even if we know up front that the suckers can never pay it off. Then we pass it around in a circle, each of us taking a chunk of money in fees (added to the loan) when it comes by."
"Won't somebody get stuck with a crap loan at some point?"
"Sure," the banker said. "That's why it's a derivative. Everybody in the game derives money from it, up to the point where somebody gets screwed."
The builder still looked a little puzzled, then his eyes brightened. "But I get mine UP FRONT. Cool!"
"Yeah," the banker said. "Cool."

Not Everyone Knows How to Use a Duckie Dic

2009-08-05T16:05:00.000-07:00

That's why we have instructions on the side of your screen.

Oh, hell. If you didn't follow instructions, you'd probably get the gist of it all anyway, but we just wanted to make sure that nobody complained that we DIDN'T TELL THEM THE FREAKIN' COFFEE WAS HOT! --- oops, wrong story, but I think you know what we mean.

Go for it! Have fun with Duckie's Dic!