They are not so much alive as undead. Open for business, but only to take rather than give. Lumbering, blank-eyed and soulless, they only want more and more of our flesh - or at least the federal government's bailout money.
Zombie banks - when there is no more room in hell, they walk on Wall Street!
When did George Romero get hold of our economy? The man behind all those zombie movies, from Night of the Living Dead to the multiple Dawn of ... and Day of ... follow-ups, seems to have scripted the current meltdown, what with entire industries lurching about on their last legs.
Zombie auto companies - they can't stop making cars that no one wants to buy!
Zombie mortgage industry - the house is in foreclosure, the lights are on but no one is home!
Zombie retailers - everything must go, but no one will take it!
It's pretty frightening when the best metaphor for what's going on in the world today is a re-animated corpse. But what other cultural reference is possible at a time when everything seems on the brink of collapse, or perhaps already dead but still nominally walking among us?
It sort of gives new meaning to those digital traffic signs in White Marsh and elsewhere that were hacked to read, "Zombies ahead." Maybe they're less a prank than a legitimate warning.
"In a sense, they're right," zombie expert Peter Dendle said with a laugh. "Can we trust authorities at this point to take care of our infrastructure?" Dendle, an associate professor of English at Penn State, is the author of The Zombie Movie Encyclopedia.
He hadn't heard the term "zombie banks" that economists have been using lately to describe institutions that are essentially insolvent but kept artificially alive by the bailout.
But he thinks it's an apt label, given that zombies are basically "the outer husks" of what they once were, robbed of their inner soul and staying alive by feeding off the living.
"They basically just move and eat," Dendle said.
So, yes, a bank that makes none of its own money but is kept alive by someone else's? A zombie.
A foreclosed property? "A home that is reduced to a house," he said, or, in other words, a zombie.
No wonder the real-life horror movie of the economy is so chilling. "It sort of dangles in front of us the notion that we're just carcasses," Dendle said.
