RT Journal Article SR Electronic(1) A1 Pühringer, Stephan A1 Hirte, Katrin YR 2015 T1 The financial crisis as a heart attack: Discourse profiles of economists in the financial crisis JF Journal of Language and Politics VO 14 IS 4 SP 599 OP 625 DO https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.14.4.06puh PB John Benjamins SN 1569-2159, AB The article analyzes the role of economists in public discourse with regard to the financial crisis. Specifically, it focuses on the prevailing rhetorical strategies and the economic convictions of leading German-speaking economists as they appear in seven leading newspapers and magazines in the German-speaking area. Special attention is given to the prevailing rationales and explanations for the financial crisis as well as on the metaphors used for describing specific economic events in particular and the market economy in general. The results of this article show that while the financial crisis could have offered a possibility for a paradigm shift in economic thinking, there is not much evidence for such a shift among German-speaking economists. The observed stability of the dominant paradigm is attributed primarily to the very stable role of certain basic economic convictions, which are exposed through the use of specific metaphors as well as a characterization of the financial crisis as a series of extraordinary and exogenously given events. (e.g. “a tsunami” or “earthquake”), UL https://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/10.1075/jlp.14.4.06puh