As a reference to the impending financial issues in the USA, fiscal cliff was first used in late 2010, when the tax cuts implemented by President Bush were originally due to expire. Popular use of the expression was galvanized by Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the US Federal Reserve, who in February 2012 said that “Under current law, on January 1, 2013, there’s going to be a massive fiscal cliff of large spending cuts and tax increases”. However, though only recently brought into the spotlight, the expression fiscal cliff is not particularly new and in fact dates back to 1957, when it first appeared in an article about home ownership in the New York Times. It took a couple of decades before it was to be used with a wider reference though, becoming popular as a metaphor for the precarious condition of state and federal budgets in the early eighties.