Good Times, Bad Times: A Keyword Analysis of Letters to Shareholders of Two Fortune 500 Banking Institutions

This corpus-based keyword analysis investigates the letters to the shareholders from two commercial banks, Bank of America and Citigroup, over a 3-year period from 2008, 2009, and 2010. The letters were compiled to facilitate a diachronic analysis, an assessment of language change over a specific period, of profit/loss reporting from two prominent financial institutions over a time period in which the recession commenced, peaked, and concluded. To conduct the analysis on the node texts, two sets of reference corpora were compiled. One reference corpus set consists of the letters to shareholders from eight consistently high-performing corporations not within the commercial banking industry for each of the 3 years; the other reference corpus set consists of the letters from the 10 banking institutions that also appeared in the Fortune 500 listings for the 3-year period. The corpus-based analysis revealed that in years of low performance companies create messages that assert a vision and forward a strategy for ensuring future success while also establishing distance between management and past failures. In contrast, when companies perform well, the keyword lists display a clear tendency of the company/author to accept praise and attribute success to actions of management.