Happy Talk solves the problems?

There's a sense afoot that the real problems we face aren't the crippled financial system or the slowing economy, but rather all the bad stuff people are saying about them.

In other words, not enough Happy Talk.

To ward off panics, financial media organizations are keeping Unhappy Talk to a minimum. "We're very careful not to throw words around like 'meltdown' and 'free fall,' " CNN correspondent Ali Velshi, who is getting mucho face time thanks to the meltdown and free fall, told the New York Times. The Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal is engaging in un-Murdochian restraint, banishing words like crash and pandemonium. Maybe I have a limited vocabulary, but I'm not sure how else to characterize a month in which the country's largest financial institutions, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, had to be nationalized; Lehman Bros., the fourth-largest investment bank, filed for Chapter 11; AIG, a component of the Dow Jones Indsutrial Average, had to turn over most of its stock to the government in exchange for an $85 billion loan; the government had to guarantee money-market funds to stop people from hoarding cash under their mattresses; the nation's largest savings and loan, Washington Mutual, failed; and the nation's greatest financial minds declare that a bailout the size of the Netherlands' GDP is needed to stop the bleeding. Yes, we have to be careful about crying fire in a crowded theater. But calling Wall Street's a meltdown a meltdown is more like crying fire in a crowded inferno.