The acronyms we’ve spawned in the latest financial crisis put even the Great Depression’s ability to create alphabet soup to shame. WSJ reported a couple of days ago on some rather funny and tragic ones:

Take, for example, the RAT Board, which in more official circles is known as the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, charged with sniffing out waste, fraud and abuse in the $787 billion plan. The Leaking Underground Storage Tank trust, an unsexy environmental cleanup fund that existed before the stimulus package, has now been unofficially rebranded LUST Recovery.

The stimulus plan also includes the SNAP, or Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly known as food stamps. To make sure that recovery money is made available fast, the Department of Transportation has created a TIGER team, as in Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery.

[A blogger also mentioned] the Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research, a 15-member council created under the recovery act that will (as the name suggests) coordinate research on the comparative effectiveness of medical treatments.

“Sounds like an OK idea to me,” she wrote. “But the acronym? Say it aloud with me, now. FCCCER.”

Felix Salmon got in on this act yesterday, after going through an 85-page white paper on the government’s attempts at financial reform (this is the kind of journalism we at LOLFed usually do not have time to do, and are thankful that others have more time on their hands). And, we know, you all knew better than to expect actual simplification from this reform. Here’s how much more cluttered your bowl of alphabet soup will be:

The [new] National Bank Supervisor will not oversee state-chartered banks: those will remain under the umbrella of the FDIC, which is not being folded into the NBS. And the NBS will similarly not oversee credit unions: the NCUA will retain its independence and continue to regulate those itself.

Why perpetuate these distinctions between federally-chartered banks, state-chartered banks, and credit unions? I have no idea. But in order to get some measure of cohesion over all this, a second brand-new regulatory entity, the Financial Services Oversight Council, or FOSC, which will consist of the leadership of the NBS; the FDIC; the NCUA; the SEC and the CFTC (yes, they are remaining separate too); the FHFA (that, too, gets to remain independent for no obvious reason); the Treasury; the FOMC; and the brand-new Consumer Financial Protection Agency.

Or, to put it another way, FOSC = NBS + FDIC + NCUA + SEC + CFTC + FHFA + FOMC + CFPA + Treasury.

I know what you’re thinking — it can’t possibly be as simple as that. And you’d be right! There’s also a Financial Consumer Coordinating Council, which comprises the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, the Federal Trade Commission, and the SEC’s Investor Advisory Committee.

There will be plenty of time to critique this in the near term, but for now we’ll go for just trying to understand it, as it appears to be buried under a whole lot of bureaucracy. And really. We’d like to work for FCCCER. Just because it would be fun to say we were FCCCERs on our business cards.