The present dissertation aims to study the metaphors in a journalistic corpus in economics.This research was based on the cognitive metaphor theory.The terms were collected in the Base de Termos da Economia (Projeto Observatório de Neologismos Científicos do Português Contemporâneo).The methodology used in the analysis of the terms allowed us make a systematic investigation on the concepts in this kind of terminology, which resulted in a "cognitive map" of the metaphors of the discipline.This "cognitive map" also provided conditions to verify the role of metaphor in economics.In order to reach these results, we selected the polysemous units of Base de Termos da Economia to verify the concepts of these terms.After this process, we agrouped the conceptual metaphors (metaphoric fields) to make an analysis of these units, which revealed that metaphor in economics serves a didactic purpose, to make the terms easily understandable for a wide audience through analogical thinking process.