The global financial crisis is no laughing matter for many people, but it has nonetheless resurrected some dreadful puns that were popular back during the Japanese banking fiasco in the 1990s. Doing the rounds by e-mail are the following:

Sumo Bank has gone belly up; Bonsai Bank is cutting its branches; Karaoke Bank is for sale and will go for a song; Samurai Bank is soldiering on; Ninja Bank is in the black; staff at Karate Bank have got the chop; and there is something fishy up at Sushi Bank.

The recent crisis has been less fruitful. Some people started cruelly referring to Northern Rock as Northern Wreck when the British lender was nationalised and analysts have lately been toying with TARP, the Troubled Asset Relief Plan. Credit Suisse and Merrill Lynch both suggested that TARP could be a TRAP while Goldman Sachs suggested it had been TARPedoed by Congress.

Surely this crisis is big enough to get better than that? Your contributions welcome.

Good morning and welcome to Before The BellWe are suspending operations until we can broker a deal in Congress to bailout, er, rescue Wall Street. We shall not publish until the crisis is solved.

Until tomorrow,
Derek Caney
Editor

P.S. Shares were down overnight. Suffice to say that if the market is up, it’s because of optimism about the Senate’s approval of a buyout plan. And if it’s down, it’s because of pessimism about the prospects of the bailout. Tuesday’s action took back more than half of the prior day’s record losses. The Senate is expected to vote on the package tonight.

President Bush, who has been guided by the tenets of small government and the free market for the past eight years, approved $25 billion in loan guarantees to the ailing auto industry, at a cost of $7.5 billion to taxpayers. The guarantees give the automakers access to low-interest loans to help convert their fleet to more fuel efficient vehicles.

The automakers are expected to release their month sales figures today. The average forecast is for U.S. auto sales to drop to a 13.5 million annual rate in September from a 16.2 million rate a year earlier and down from a 13.7 million rate in August.

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Like most intellectuals and sophisticates, I read the cartoons in The New Yorker before going on to all those articles filled with big words and umlauts. In doing that in the October 6 edition, I noticed that every one of them pertains to the financial crisis.

The New Yorker, which has made a market of acidic, sharp and occasionally opaque observances of upper-class life in its cartoons for decades, usually features a grab-bag of themes and illustrators in its pages. This is the first time that every cartoon is devoted to one topic, however.

While it’s always more dandy to read the magazine on paper, its website features a slideshow. Enjoy the meltdown.

Cartoon Editor Bob Mankoff said there was enough good material that magazine Editor David Remnick said all the submissions should reflect the turmoil. Mankoff also said he enjoys the simplicity that the cartoons bring to the complicated mix of bad debt, funny money and the complicated interdependence of the once-powerful financial firms.

“It’s not that complicated; It’s other people’s money — and you don’t care that much about it,” he said. “I think humor does act as a sort of rough-and-ready B.S. detector.”

(Image courtesy of Conde Nast/The New Yorker)