fire sale

See also: firesale and fire-sale

English

Etymology

By metonymy, from 19th century discount sales of products that had been damaged by fire or that could no longer be stored because the storage facility had been destroyed by fire necessitating immediate sale or loss of value.

Noun

fire sale (plural fire sales)

1. (idiomatic) A clearance sale at greatly reduced prices, often at losses.
   • 2015, Chris Lehmann, ‘The Candidates’, London Review of Books, volume 37, number 12:

     By the following year, Lehman’s enormous holdings in subprime loans were all but wiped out, and Bush was enlisted to see if he could engineer a fire sale of some of the bank’s empire of debt to the Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim.

   • 2015 August 16, Press Association, “Wolves rescue point against Hull thanks to Allan McGregor howler”, in The Guardian‎^[1]:

     Bruce was happy with a point and is now focused on surviving a fire-sale at the KC Stadium before the transfer window shuts, with Tom Huddlestone linked with West Ham. “We have lost 14 players and brought in five or six but the transfer window [closing] is still three weeks away,” he said.

   • 2022 June 30, Kate Rooney, “FTX closes in on a deal to buy embattled crypto lender BlockFi for $25 million in a fire sale, source says”, in CNBC‎^[2]:

     The fire sale comes a week after FTX provided a $250 million emergency line of credit to BlockFi.

Translations

clearance sale at reduced prices

• Chinese:

  Mandarin: 清倉甩賣／清仓甩卖 (qīngcāng shuǎimài)

• Finnish: poistomyynti
• German: Ausverkauf (de) m
• Thai: โละทิ้ง, ขายโละทิ้ง

Anagrams

• feralise, filarees, safelier