AMERICAN economist Stephen S. Roach, chief button puncher at respected Wall Street investment bank Morgan Stanley, would have remained in relative obscurity, feted only in his narrow circle of fellow professionals, if only he had not coined the phrase "downsizing".

The expression, which provided a new mantra for boardrooms in the early eighties, has become an acceptable euphemism for contrived unemployment to enhance profits. In a remarkable about turn Mr Roach has seen the error of his ways, his conversion made public this week in a memo to his firm's clients. "Relentless cost cutting is generally bad for business and invites a worker backlash, not on the shopfloor but in the polling booths".

This startling re evaluation is reminiscent of US physicist Robert Oppenheimer who, having developed the atomic bomb in the mid 1940s, also saw the error of his ways and opposed further research work on the hydrogen bomb, only to be labelled a security risk by Senator Joseph McCarthy. From now on Roach, like Oppemheimer, may have to pay a high price to corporate America for his new found moral conscience.