MELTDOWN

Definition by James Howard Kunstler
from The Daily Reckoning

"What is meant by "meltdown," by the way, since the word is used so
promiscuously by myself and others. I'd define it as the shock of
recognition that many big institutions are worse than flat broke and are
therefore powerless to conduct normal operations. By "worse than flat
broke" I mean they are so deep in hock that all the accountants who ever
lived, in the life of this universe and several others like it, using the
fastest parallel processing computers ever built, could not keep up with
their compounding accelerating losses (now approaching the speed of
light)."