Even before Labour came to power, Rachel Reeves had coined the term she would use to describe her economic policy as chancellor of the Exchequer: securonomics, neatly blending “security” with “economics”.
I asked Reeves for her definition. She said it was “an economic idea focused on building a strong economy in a more unstable world through government putting security, for family finances and for the national economy, first.” For her, “the word just seemed a natural distillation of the ideas we were talking about. I think the challenge of our time is to restore that foundation of security, which allows working people and businesses to succeed.”
Reeves launched the word and its concept in a speech in Washington DC in May 2023. The US is the home of a stream of “-nomics” terms, beginning in 1969, when a journalist coined Nixonomics for the economic policies of Richard Nixon. The following year, Reaganomics summed up the policies of Ronald Reagan, who was then governor of California, and was revived in the 1980s, when he became president, to describe his promotion of unrestricted free market activity and lower taxes. Clintonomics as a term never gained the popular traction of Reaganomics, but Bidenomics has surpassed them all in usage, with Maganomics trailing far behind.
The “-nomics” combining form has not always been used to describe serious policies. Freakonomics referred to the application of economic tools to answer unusual questions and to find surprising connections between seemingly unrelated phenomena. Bubblenomics captures the economics of speculative financial bubbles which result in rapid escalations in market value, whether that be the crypto bubble, housing bubble or dotcom bubble. And then there’s bagelnomics—coined after the revelation that a US councilman had claimed expenses of $177 for a bagel.
Journalists have traditionally invented these terms, but it was Reeves herself who coined securonomics. As she explained to me: “I had just finished work on a pamphlet setting out Labour’s economic argument, which would soon be launching in Washington DC. We had all the ideas but were still looking for a simple, memorable name.” Her concept was influenced by three things: Bidenomics; the US Treasury secretary Janet Yellen’s notion of “modern supply-side economics”; and the idea of “productivism”. She was searching for a “digestible” term to sum all this up. “The name came to me as a stroke of inspiration at a shadow Treasury team awayday in Westminster,” she told me.
I put it to Reeves that her term might eventually make it into the Oxford English Dictionary. “If the term catches on,” she said, “I hope that will mean our economic ideas have caught on in a big way—and that would be good news for the British economy. So I would be very proud.”
