Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Zombie company


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was   no consensus. Black Kite 09:20, 23 February 2009 (UTC)

Zombie company

 * ( [ delete] ) – (View AfD) (View log)

Neologism; non-sourced slang term Mhking (talk) 21:41, 17 February 2009 (UTC)
 * Delete This is somebody's attempt to create a new word during this era of company bailouts. Mandsford (talk) 22:05, 17 February 2009 (UTC)
 * Redirect to Bankruptcy or some more appropriate target. The phrase has been in common use at least since the Japanese economic crisis of the 1990s, and is a common search term, but the current article topic is not appropriately focused and doesn't contain material worth saving.  If somebody else wants to perform an article salvage, that's fine, too.  Baileypalblue (talk) 23:36, 17 February 2009 (UTC)
 * I just noticed this article was created a day ago -- let's give the page creator time to work. Baileypalblue (talk) 23:37, 17 February 2009 (UTC)
 * Provisional Keep/Commentary - The article was just created yesterday. Let's give the creator some time to bring this up to spec.  Also, I remember hearing the term on a couple news shows (Either CTV, Global, or BNN.  Can't remember at the moment), so I don't think this was made up by just this guy.  A google search for "zombie companies" turns up a few thousand hits, including the NY Times  from 2002, so this isn't particularly new.  Though I question whether this is really suitable for wikipedia, as I somewhat doubt as to if a real article can be constructed for this.  If not, it ought to be transwiki'd to wiktionary.  Grandmartin11 (talk) 00:01, 18 February 2009 (UTC)
 * Rather than let this linger in the mainspace, I suggest if the outcome is to let the author work on it, the article should be userfied until such time it is up to scratch. - Mgm|(talk) 10:19, 18 February 2009 (UTC)
 * Keep and maybe redirect somewhere like the TARP article? Probably worth a mention there. So I would say transwiki, merge and redirect. How's that for an answer! A TRIFECTA!!! ChildofMidnight (talk) 00:52, 18 February 2009 (UTC)
 * No good merge target at this time. Term is notable enough to be worth including and there's no harm in a stub. There is harm in losing this sourced and notable terminology. ChildofMidnight (talk) 03:10, 20 February 2009 (UTC)
 * Adjust my vote to keep. Term is notable. It's not the same as bankruptcy. It refers to walking dead, like a zombie. Company that is non functional and not alive, but kept going none the less. ChildofMidnight (talk) 00:05, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

Here are a few more (I put them on the article talk page too...) The zombies have become a political lightning rod. Japan's economy and financial services minister, Heizo Takenaka, wants the banks to assess their loan books more strictly and force the no-hope borrowers into liquidation. But many politicians have backed the resistance of banks to shutting down the zombies, for fear of widespread layoffs and a loss of political contributions from them." . ChildofMidnight (talk) 00:18, 21 February 2009 (UTC)
 * keeps coming to mind. Funnily enough, the problems of bankruptcy and failure and government subsidy are not new ones that companies have only been experiencing in the last few months, and did exist even before Internet did. This sort of recentism doesn't help readers to learn that.  This should at best redirect somewhere, so that readers who come to Wikipedia with a hokey slang name made up by journalists are directed to proper information on a centuries-old subject so that they learn better &mdash; the encyclopaedia performing its function of imparting good knowledge to replace poor knowledge, if one will.  The payment of a government subsidy to a company otherwise facing bankruptcy has traditionally (where "traditionally" means "at least four decades longer than this name has been around") been called corporate welfare.  Uncle G (talk) 10:47, 18 February 2009 (UTC)
 * Keep This isn't a recent buzzword, but it was invented during the last recession. Although this isn't a dictionary, the article could be about the concept, and not the phrase, which itself would be better suited to Wiktionary. Userfication should be done for this, and really, there's no rush to get it done. I hope my arguments are acceptable. --Litherlandsand (talk) 10:50, 18 February 2009 (UTC)
 * We already have an article about the concept. It's corporate welfare, as I said.  That's what people, from TIME magazine through the Los Angeles Times to the Washington Post, call it.  This is a recent buzzphrase for exactly the same concept. Uncle G (talk) 22:18, 18 February 2009 (UTC)
 * Merge to some similar article such as Chapter 11, Insolvency or Lame duck. Colonel Warden (talk) 16:35, 18 February 2009 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Business-related deletion discussions.   -- • Gene93k (talk) 20:56, 18 February 2009 (UTC)
 * Comment this appears to be a valid search term, but the phrase does not appear to have a consistent or clear definition. For example, lame duck is probably a synonym but is a disambiguation page, bailout, insolvency, corporate welfare, bankruptcy and Chapter 11, Title 11, United States Code would all appear to be relevant but don't fit all definitions, and Chapter 11 only refers to one country (not the one mentioned in the article). — Snigbrook  23:59, 19 February 2009 (UTC)
 * I added another citation. ChildofMidnight (talk) 17:55, 20 February 2009 (UTC)
 * I have to run but there's also "And now, with the exception of Lehman Brothers, most of these banks feel pretty close to invulnerable with a $250 billion government investment in their preferred stock in the offing. So much so, that some economists, like Brad DeLong of Berkeley, suggest that Wall Street could become like Japan's complacent banking sector. "The worry is that Paulson is in the process of creating a bunch of zombie banks," DeLong says." here, a mention somewhere here and "Are we going to end up like Japan, in other words, a nether world of "zombie banks" that are not dead but not really alive either, still unable to work their way out from under all that bad debt? No one would have ever imagined this could happen in America, but conditions are ripe for just such an outcome." here . These uses apply to banks, but the terminology works for companies too (think autos) and just has to be found and cited. ChildofMidnight (talk) 19:39, 20 February 2009 (UTC)
 * I added a New York Times story with Zombie phrasing in its headlines about Japanese companies kept on life support. ChildofMidnight (talk) 00:07, 21 February 2009 (UTC)
 * "Fearing more bad news if banks were forced to disclose their real losses, Japan’s leaders allowed banks to keep loans to “zombie” companies on their balance sheets. Japan, instead, experimented with a series of funds, in part privately financed, to relieve banks of their bad assets."
 * "Paradoxically, though they are declining to extend credit to many smaller and stronger companies, the banks have been reluctant to cut off their worst customers, the all-but-insolvent zombie companies that have little or no hope of ever repaying their loans. Government subsidies, low interest rates and easy treatment by the banks keep these companies stumbling along because, in the short term, it is cheaper for the banks than letting them die and then having to write off all that has been lent to them."
 * "Falling land and stock prices have also conspired against the banks, which hold huge portfolios of those assets. And the banks are continuing to prop up large numbers of zombie companies, which have heavy debts and weak if any prospects of repaying them.


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.