In the media coverage of the subprime crisis of August 2007, it is through translation that journalists worked to explain its causes, which were of American origin, to the Canadian French and English readerships. In order to efficiently convey complicated concepts and the gravity of the situation, journalists resorted to metaphors of the accident, the cataclysm, the catastrophe and the epidemy. The article analyzes the conceptual metaphors found in La Presse, Le Devoir, The Toronto Star and The Globe and Mail and argues that far from being harmless commonplaces they propagate a neoliberal ideology of economics.