I'm wondering what word or phrase could be used for the counter examples of 'Midas touch' effect.

The Midas touch, or the gift of profiting from whatever one undertakes, is named for a legendary king of Phrygia. Midas was granted the power to transmute whatever he touched into gold. http://www.mythweb.com/today/today04.html

For example: "Jack has the Midas touch but is still penniless because Sally is/has ?????"


I heard "everything he touches turns into shit" in a movie, can't remember which one though.

Search results include "The Murphy's touch" when searching for this quote.


Sally's presence/involvement is the kiss of death.

Jay's "born loser" is close but I think of that as mostly bringing ruin to the loser himself, while you seem to be looking for a term for someone who causes ruin to others.


The problem with evil eye is it implies malicious intent. The problem with jinx is it often implies misfortune for the jinxed person, rather than for those around him. If someone unintentionally brings bad luck to others...

he's a Jonah - a person believed to bring bad luck to those around him; a jinx

It's from the Old Testament Hebrew prophet who, having been thrown overboard from a ship in which he was fleeing from God, was swallowed by a great fish and vomited onto dry land.

From the other sailors' point of view, having Jonah aboard obviously wasn't a good thing. I don't know if the Bible records what happened to the rest of the crew on the original occasion, but sailors in general have long used "a Jonah" to mean a person (either a sailor or a passenger) whose presence on board brings bad luck and endangers the ship. From which it's passed into common parlance to mean anyone who brings bad luck to any enterprise.


It's called the tainted touch -- everything that she/he touched becomes "tainted" and became undesirable (which is reverse-Midas). There is even a movie by that name.


The "reverse Midas touch" is popularly used and I think, unfortunately, comes the closest to what you're looking for. The "kiss of death" doesn't really have any financial connotations and refers to an action rather than a personal quality - the Oxford English Dictionary defines it as "a seemingly kind or well-intentioned action, look, association, etc., which brings disastrous consequences."

Search the archives of any news publication (like the NY Times) to see published instances of "reverse Midas touch."

Or search google for literary references https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=reverse+Midas+touch&case_insensitive=on&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Creverse%20Midas%20touch%3B%2Cc0