doom loop

English

Etymology

In the finance sense described by Andrew Haldane and Piergiorgio Alessandri in 2009.

Noun

doom loop (plural doom loops)

1. A death spiral or adverse feedback loop.
   • 2021 December 16, Larry Elliott, “Britain must find a new way out of its Covid doom loop”, in The Guardian‎:

     Britain is caught in a Covid doom loop, the pattern of which is becoming depressingly familiar. A new variant of the virus appears. It spreads rapidly. Restrictions are imposed to slow transmission rates and to take pressure off the NHS, but the economy suffers.

   • 2023 May 20, Tabby Kinder, George Hammond, “So long, San Francisco”, in FT Weekend, Life & Arts, page 1:

     Online discourse about San Francisco's “doom loop”, a downward economic and social spiral that becomes irreversible, feels less like hyperbole by the day.

   • 2025 August 10, Natasha Singer, “Computer Science Grads Struggle to Find Jobs in the A.I. Age”, in The New York Times‎, New York, N.Y.: The New York Times Company, →ISSN, →OCLC:

     Some graduates described feeling caught in an A.I. “doom loop.”

     (Can we archive this URL?)

   • 2025 September 25, Jacob Judah, “How AI and Wikipedia have sent vulnerable languages into a doom spiral”, in MIT Technology Review‎:

     That can make the models’ translation of these languages particularly error-prone, which creates a sort of linguistic doom loop as people continue to add more and more poorly translated Wikipedia pages using those tools, and AI models continue to train from poorly translated pages.

2. (finance) A feedback loop that can occur when banks hold government bonds and governments with weak public finances bail out such banks.
   • 2011, William Leiss, The Doom Loop in the Financial Sector: And Other Black Holes of Risk, University of Ottawa Press, →ISBN, page 126:

     This is the only remedy that would permit an escape from the “doom loop” described by Piergiorgio Alessandri and Andrew Haldane (2009), whereby, when financial institutions are seen as “too big to fail,” governments have no option but to bail them out with public money, no matter how many times they claim they will not do so.

   • 2022 September 29, Kalyeena Makortoff, Sarah Butler, “‘I’d never seen anything like it’: how market turmoil sparked a pension fund selloff”, in The Guardian‎:

     However, uncertainty over the scale of the selloff – and how long it would run – raised concerns about a “doom loop”, where asset sales depressed prices further, resulting in higher collateral calls, which then sparked further sales.