evergreening
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 1.13 in modern English
17
Scrabble Score
12
Letters
4
Syllables
6
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
Any of various actions that extend the lifespan of some object, idea, practice, etc., making it evergreen.
Uncountable
Example Sentences
- "The basic story is that after 1990, the Japanese economy slowed down, and lots of companies that used to be profitable — especially in the construction, retail, and trading sectors — were no longer profitable. These companies owed a lot of money to banks. If they stopped being able to pay back their loans, the banks would be forced to recognize bad debt on their books. This would get them in trouble with regulators (because of capital requirements), and it would also get them in trouble with the Japanese public. So what the banks did was to lend even more money to the failing companies that already owed them a lot of money, at very cheap interest rates. The new loans were used to pay back the old loans, and the new loans would be classified on the bank’s books as “good” debt. This process — known as “evergreening” — kept banks from ever having to acknowledge their losses: [data graph: prevalence of firms receiving subsidized loans in Japan; source: Caballero et al. (2008).] Peek and Rosengren (2005) document this empirically as well. Evergreening kept a bunch of companies afloat — like Daiei — that had utterly broken business models. Theoretically, the companies could have eventually pivoted their business models and recovered, or Japan’s economy could have started booming again, etc. In practice, this never happened."