Remember the lesson of Shaun of the Dead: some zombies eventually come back to life

Funny how little phrases go viral. Suddenly everyone’s talking about ‘fasting diets’, ‘zombie companies’ and ‘leadership plots’. As to the first, the idea of the ‘5:2 intermittent fasting diet’, I gather, is to eat as little as you can for two days a week. It’s all over the media, and any moment now someone will call George Osborne’s fiscal strategy ‘the 0:7 fasting diet that’s starving us of protein for growth’, or some such. There you are, Mr Balls: yours on a plate, as it were.

But ‘zombie companies’ are not so easy to explain. Financially speaking, these are businesses that are surviving but unable to invest in new capacity, kept alive only by low interest rates and banks’ unwillingness to convert them into bad debts by pulling the plug. More loosely, the phrase applies to retailers — the likes of the Blockbuster video chain, which went under last month — that go on trading long after their high-street business models are overwhelmed by online alternatives. Zombies are offered as a reason why the low levels of insolvency and high numbers of private-sector jobs in this extended downturn are not the positive counter-indicators they appear to be: capital and labour are being ‘hoarded’ in moribund businesses, depressing productivity and inhibiting the Darwinian process by which, as the hard-nut turnaround investor Jon Moulton told the BBC, ‘things are tossed on the bonfire and something better emerges… We need failure as part of the solution.’

All very Austrian School, you might think, and unkind to business owners who have chosen to batten down the hatches, preserving the jobs of loyal staff on a part-time basis if need be until the upswing arrives. The pattern of struggle is as evident by observation in any small town, including mine, as it is from statistics reported by the business rescue specialist Begbies Traynor under the headline ‘Green shoots of recovery despite GDP gloom’.