Based on a corpus of British financial news reports, this article discusses the influence of political and socio-economic factors on the use of metaphor in financial news discourse, seeking to establish whether neo-liberalism as a predominant economic ideology structures metaphor and whether this, in turn, is affected by events such as September 11, which changed the socio-economic setting. The approach is largely cognitive linguistic, at the same time emphasising the interactive and persuasive aspects of metaphor. Thus, metaphor is seen as a way of structuring our understanding of concepts as well as a way of interacting with the reader. In the corpus, three main metaphorical clusters are analysed. The first one presents the September-11 attacks as entities with strong impact on the economy, creating powerful allusions to war and thus setting the framework for understanding the full entailments of the other two clusters, which depict the economy as an organism and an entity/substance respectively. The latter two, it is argued, may be used to promote and support a neo-liberal agenda. Together, the three clusters provide a basis for demonstrating how metaphors may interact to create a coherent image of the economy and thus function both conceptually and interactively. (Lise-Lotte Holmgreen)