Crisis, what crisis? It's likely to be more serious than that

An aerial view of a housing area is seen on the outskirts of Beijing. A slow down in China would have a dramatic impact on the rest of the world. (AP Photo/Vincent Thian)

There is not, as far as I can tell, a collective noun to describe a great number of crises.

Neither is there a distinct definition of just how long, exactly, a single crisis can go on for.

We all know a recession is two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth, or in plain English, six months of going backwards. You know where you are with a recession.

A depression is a slightly trickier beast to track, having eluded a real definition since it first appeared in about 1819.

Even so, economists largely fall into two camps on the depression definition. There are those who wait for a GDP decline of more than 10 per cent before they reach for the smelling salts and those who stick to the calendar and wait for two straight years of recession before dusting down the "D" word.

Not so with a crisis.

We seem to have endured an endless series of crises for so many years now it is hard to remember a time without one.

The whole mess began as the US declared the subprime mortgage crisis, which was but a preamble to the housing bubble crisis, which then became the credit crunch - a crisis if ever there was one - that spilled over into the banking crisis that culminated in the Lehman Brothers crisis.

From there we sped across the Atlantic to enjoy the euro-zone crisis made up of sovereign debt crises divided into the Greek debt crisis, the Italian debt crisis, the Spanish and of course the plucky Portuguese crisis.

These are all still going on.

In Britain there was another banking crisis, just for good measure.

A quick trip back to the other side of the pond found the debt ceiling crisis was just beginning.

From there of course we had the ratings downgrade crisis, which has recently popped up again in Europe.

In just half a decade we have endured more than a dozen, probably closer to 20, crises of one sort or another and nobody has managed to group them together into one neat bundle as with the grandfather of all financial crises The Great Depression. Some have tried with pretenders such as The Great Recession but that one didn't stick, primarily because the definition of recession, as previously noted, is as precise as a Swiss timepiece.

"What about The Global Financial Crisis [GFC]?," you might ask. "Will that not do?" No, it will not.

The GFC is frankly just another crisis to throw on the heap and it isn't exactly the most enchanting phrase to coin. There is no dustbowl drama whistling about its syllables.

There must be a simple reason behind the inability to construct a phrase to adequately sum up our economic predicament and preserve it for posterity.

The romantic might posit that it is all too horrible for words, causing us to retreat from language in terror.

A more sober reasoning might be, however, that we have not as yet faced the defining moment of this financial crisis - and we know it.

We have a creeping suspicion there is something yet to come, just around the corner perhaps, that will be so awe-inspiringly cataclysmic we will know its name as soon as we see it.

It looks increasingly likely the definition we seek, however, will be coined not in English, but Mandarin.

House prices have tumbled in more than 50 of China's 70 biggest cities in the past three months, export growth slowed to just above 13 per cent from more than 25 per cent in the last four months of last year while GDP growth is slowing much faster than anticipated.

Even the mildest slowdown in China would have disastrous repercussions for the rest of the world, particularly oil producing nations such as the UAE that rely on the giant Asian economy to continue devouring fossil fuels.

With that in mind, we could do worse than refer to this ever-lengthening period of decline as "Bu-jin-qi", the Mandarin for depression, slump or recession. The literal translation of its characters says it all with economy and simplicity: "prosperity not I".