The following article by Chris Tribble discusses the uses of words associated with money in the (Manchester) Guardian Weekly.

A very bankable bad-news word

To say that money has been in the news recently would be an understatement, but it is a word that preoccupies us even when we're not experiencing a global banking crisis. While sex has only been mentioned 4,790 times in the Guardian Weekly archive, money has been used a whopping 12,387 times, putting it into the same high-frequency league as Europe, book, death, rights and family.

The other top money related words are cash (3,102), credit (2,020), shares (1,682), assets (1,190), loans (946), savings (814), debts (740), stocks (778), investments (434) and bonds (411).

So how does money get into the news? One reason is that people and organisations have to raise money, make money, or don't have enough money. Another is our interest in how public money and taxpayers' money are managed. The biggest reason, however, seems to be money laundering, way ahead of more respectable topics such as the money supply.

Looking at the other money words, many of these are also related to a variety of bad news. Cash stories focus on cash strapped organisations (those without enough money), cash payments and cash crops (often negatively reported as distorting local ecologies), with far fewer comments on cash injections, cash flow and cash dispensers.

Shares and share prices are in the news more often when they fall. Bonds can be government or treasury but also often junk (lower grade corporate bonds that carry higher risk). Assets can be state or financial, but they are more newsworthy when they are frozen. Savings seem to be more neutral (being life, offshore and held in accounts), but debts are most often reported as bad, huge or unpayable.

And what of the most topical money word at the moment? As you would expect, credit is most strongly linked with card and cards but it is also associated with crunch. The credit crunch combinations first came into the Guardian Weekly as far back as June 1998 at the time of the credit crisis in Japan. However, of the 83 instances of credit crunch in this newspaper in the last 10 years, 68 have occurred since July 2007. I suspect that we will continue to see this particular combination of words for some time to come.