Finance terms from the week of Monday, August 10, 2026
10 clues and answers from Thursday, August 13, 2026 to Friday, August 14, 2026, each with a
plain-language definition where the term is one worth knowing. These
puzzles are no longer playable; today's game is on the
play page and the last seven days are in the
practice archive.
1 Over the course of a frantic weekend in March 2023 Swiss regulators brokered a 3.2 billion dollar rescue deal where a major banking institution acquired its 167 year old domestic rival to prevent a global banking crisis after the failing bank suffered massive deposit outflows exceeding 100 billion dollars in a single quarter.
Answer: UBS(3 letters)
2 In September 1992 a prominent hedge fund manager famously broke the Bank of England by short selling more than 10 billion dollars worth of a specific European currency forcing the central bank to withdraw from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism and instantly generating an estimated profit of 1 billion dollars in a single day.
Answer: SOROS(5 letters)
3 Once valued at an astonishing 32 billion dollars in early 2022 a prominent cryptocurrency exchange filed for bankruptcy protection just months later in November after a leaked balance sheet revealed that its affiliated trading firm held massive amounts of highly illiquid proprietary tokens sparking a catastrophic bank run of 6 billion dollars in just 72 hours.
Answer: FTX(3 letters)
4 During sovereign debt restructurings and corporate bankruptcy proceedings this specific financial term describes the exact percentage reduction applied to the face value of a bond or loan meaning that creditors holding 100 million dollars in distressed debt might only recover 60 million dollars after taking a 40 percent loss on their initial principal.
Answer: HAIRCUT(7 letters)
The discount applied to an asset's market value when it is pledged as collateral, protecting the lender against price falls.
5 Often referred to as the fear gauge of global equity markets this prominent index tracks the 30 day implied volatility of the Standard and Poors 500 through the pricing of options contracts and historically spikes above a reading of 40 during severe financial panics like the 2008 credit crisis and the early 2020 global market crash.
Answer: VIX(3 letters)
An index of expected 30-day volatility in the S&P 500, derived from option prices.
1 In 2015 a health technology corporation reached a private valuation of 10 billion dollars by claiming its proprietary blood testing devices required only a single pinprick of blood before regulatory investigations revealed widespread fraud that ultimately reduced the company valuation to zero by 2018.
Answer: THERANOS(8 letters)
2 During a severe economic crisis reaching its peak in 2008 a southern African nation printed currency denominations as high as 100 trillion dollars attempting to keep pace with a monthly price increase phenomenon that economists estimated reached 79 billion percent causing citizens to abandon the local currency entirely.
Answer: INFLATION(9 letters)
The rate at which the general price level rises, so each unit of currency buys less than it did. Usually quoted as a year-over-year percentage change in a price index such as CPI.
3 On a Monday morning in September 2008 an investment bank founded 158 years earlier filed for bankruptcy protection while holding over 600 billion dollars in assets which remains the largest bankruptcy filing in the history of the United States and triggered a massive global financial panic.
Answer: LEHMAN(6 letters)
4 In commodity derivative markets this structural pricing anomaly occurs when physical delivery contracts expiring in the near future trade at a premium to contracts expiring later which often forces commercial consumers to pay 20 percent or more above historical averages to secure immediate supply during severe inventory shortages.
Answer: BACKWARDATION(13 letters)
A futures market where contracts for later delivery trade below nearer ones, so the curve slopes downward - the opposite of contango.
5 A commercial real estate enterprise founded in 2010 reached a staggering private market valuation of 47 billion dollars under the backing of the SoftBank Vision Fund before a disastrous attempt at an initial public offering in 2019 exposed massive operating losses and corporate governance failures that ultimately forced out its eccentric founder.