On haircuts, economic and others

Today is my haircut day. I have never liked haircuts, so I limit them to four per year, pretty close to the solstices and equinoxes. They augur the new season for me.

So too it seems do economic haircuts. But not quite. Greece’s economic haircut was meant to open up a new phase, but as anyone in the country will tell you, it is business as usual.

And while we are on the subject of haircuts, why has the term established itself so quickly in the economic dictionary? What exactly is it about haircut that makes it a suitable metaphor for a debt rescheduling or cancellation? 

The most obvious answer is that hair keeps growing. I am too aware of it. Debt too, then, could be expected to regrow, no matter how many haircuts it gets. Not the obvious reason to use the term, either by economists or politicians, I suspect. 

Maybe, a haircut is meant to be ‘painless’, unlike other forms of surgery. Again, I don’t think that economists and politicians would like the idea, to say nothing of investors and bankers who must bear the burden of the haircut. 

What then is it about debt relief that evokes a haircut? As someone who has sat passively in frozen terror in the barber’s chair, I have a different idea. Haircuts evokes the use of sharp and dangerous weapons, siscors, razor blades and the like, on a subject who is temporarily out of action, who is not a subject at all.  

Maybe, however, the appeal of the term goes deeper still. As is well-known, in times past the job of the barber often coincided with that of the surgeon. Would it be too much to suggest that when short back and sides will no longer do, the patient will be up for more drastic treatment?


P.S. I welcome suggestions for the economic meaning of 'haircut'. Suggestions will enter a competition and the best entry gets a haircut on me.