The Tech Bubble, the S&L crisis, the Asian Financial Crisis, the Mexican Peso Crisis, the Russian Debt Default – to all of these debacles, a name has been fixed.

Not so with the mess we are in now. We are clearly in a crisis, but the situation is fluid, the extent unknown, and the terminology in flux. In short, it’s a perfect time to try to define what’s going on and to attach an appropriate name.

The Contestants?

Cataclysmic events most often take their names from the storm that fed the flood. So the front runner here is clearly “the subprime crisis.” It was the unexpected surge in subprime defaults that set off a global wave of write downs and credit jitters. “Fed Shrugged as Subprime Crisis Spread” was the headline over Ed Andrews' piece in the Times on 12/18/2007. Floyd Norris took on the “subprime crisis” and answered his own question in a column dated December 13, 2007 and titled “Can Things Get Worse?”

I find the word “crisis” shopworn, so I used “subprime meltdown” or simply “subprime mess” in my early reporting of this financial upheaval. Not much better, I admit, but “crisis” always strikes me as too high-toned to capture the fear that often grips financial markets. “Meltdown” did about as well as Huckabee in New Hampshire, finishing well back in a Google search of terms used in a page title. “Subprime crisis”: 1360. “Subprime Meltdown”: 431.

The more generic “mortgage crisis” is actually ahead of subprime in the headline primary, but I just can’t imagine so generic a term will end up taking hold in the popular financial imagination. Mortgage crisis does avoid a problem flagged by the Washington Post’s Neil Irwin. Irwin writes, “I am trying to avoid the term subprime in passing reference, both because it is a somewhat technical term, and it construes the crisis too narrowly (this is a much broader set of problems, it's just the subprime issues happened first).”

Lots of people, including me, agree with Neil that subprime is just too narrow to capture the extent of this problem. If only subprime was in trouble, we wouldn’t be in trouble. I think that’s why Mark Zandi is calling it “Subprime Financial Shock.” Adding in “financial shock” captures the way subprime touched off a much broader wave of events.

Mark has some company here. In his speech on 1/10/2008, Ben Bernanke first mentions the “subprime crisis” and then moves on to the “subprime shock.” In so doing, he distinguishes between the challenge to homeowners and housing posed by subprime foreclosures and the hit taken by financial markets. A few sentences later, Bernanke refers to “the far-reaching financial impact of the subprime shock.” That’s tight usage, drawing a distinction between the cause and the effect.

Lou Crandall at Wrightson ICAP agrees it is important to define the pain with some precision. Lou understands markets and also knows how to turn a phrase (Crandall once told me this mess showed “the emptors weren’t watching their caveats!”) Lou says this mess: “has had so many ramifications that we give specific names to different parts of it: the ABCP collapse, the subprime meltdown, the liquidity freeze, etc.”

When many things are going wrong at the same time, TV people like me reach for an “umbrella lead,” the one phrase that ties it all together. So it is that we come to another contender for the title: “Credit Crisis” or the more evocative “Credit Squeeze.” The Journal trotted out “Credit Turmoil,’ a weak contender I would say. Turmoil is a mental state of confusion or agitation. In the stages of financial shock, we’ve gone past confusion and bargaining to actual pain.

Martin Wolf at the FT is leader of the pack arguing we’re in the middle of a big event. In a column on 12/11/2007, headlined “Why the credit squeeze is a turning point for the world,” Wolf writes: “This ‘credit crunch’ may, I believe, be an . . . important turning point for financial markets and the world economy. . . . [W]hat is happening in credit markets today is a huge blow to the credibility of the Anglo-Saxon model of transactions-orientated financial capitalism.”

The problem with credit squeeze/crunch/crisis is the implication that average folks can’t get money. Yes, Jumbo loans are hard to come by, but credit cards and auto loans are flowing. So are loans to businesses. The real credit crisis is on Wall Street. (It’s called underwriting when you and I can’t get a loan. When Wall Street can’t borrow at ten-to-one leverage to buy impossible to understand assets, it’s called a credit crisis.) So I give the advantage to “subprime shock.”

Another problem with “credit crisis” is that it’s boring, too plain vanilla. Fortune’s Allan Sloan offers up “debt debacle!” It’s alliterative, alive, and fun. It’s also a nice way to mock Wall Street’s hubris. That’s why I like it. But “debt debacle” is the Ron Paul/Mike Gravel of the race -- provocative, but unlikely to capture the prize.

Philip R. Perkins, co-manager of the Delaware Diversified Income Fund, tipped me off to the Obama of this race. It’s a fresh contender that unites and inspires. Perkins calls the current financial crisis “The Big Unwind.” Unwind refers to a global de-leveraging of hedge funds, banks, and everyone else. It’s also flight to simplicity, a return to assets that are easier to understand than the bundles of subprime loans parked in complex pools around the world.

I chased down the origin of “The Big Unwind” and quickly came to the even grander “Great Unwind.” And the best part is that there is a real author attached to this phrase.

Stefan-Michael Staimann and Susanne Knips at Dresdner Kleinwort dug deep into the hedge fund industry, examining closely the ties between hedge fund borrowing and Wall Street investment banks. The report warned that it would not be pretty if those funds made bad bets and had to pay back those loans in a hurry. That process was dubbed “the great unwind.”

When I emailed Stefan, he wrote back, “I am not sure where exactly I picked up the phrase 'great unwind' (I can't believe I invented it). To me, it simply describes nicely the reversal of financial imbalances and excesses that had built up primarily in credit markets over the last few years.” Stefan’s term goes after the whole thing: “the 'unwinding' affects particularly the leverage many market participants had been willing to take (SIVs, conduits, hedge funds, sub-prime borrowers, ...), the prices of real assets that had been bought with this excess leverage (e.g. residential and commercial real estate), and the prices of financial assets that were 'artificially' influenced during this process.”

“The Great Unwind” is elegant and sweeping, but I fear it is too inside to take hold of the popular imagination. The pros might like it, but a crisis this big requires a village. And so far, the clear front runners are subprime crisis and credit crisis.

Of course, if things really don’t go well, we may just end up calling this mess “the 2008 recession.”