In 2008 a financial crisis threatened to make economies collapse worldwide. The world entered an era of bank and businesses failures, private defaults and massive layoffs. The crisis became a major topic in the media. The present article sets out to analyse the conceptualization of the crisis in the English, Spanish and French press. It found that journalists relied heavily on metaphorical imagery to describe it. The crisis was conceived in terms of a structured set of conceptual metaphors which depict it as a living organism, a disease, natural disaster, a weather phenomenon and a harmful object. These metaphors not only shape the readers’ view of the crisis, but also construct a negative evaluation of this economic phenomenon by highlighting its harmful effects. The study also shows the commonalities and divergences in the conceptualization of the crisis across languages.