China\'s Post-Cheesecake Economy

HONG KONG - The sprawling Chinese economy is hard to read at the best of times. This week, as I wrote here, a flood of data painted a complex picture: shades of gloom (the slowest expansion in years) mixed with nuggets of optimistic - or at least less bad - news (a stabilization in September).

Analysts, left scrambling for metaphors, spiced up their commentary with a mix of old favorites and new creations.

Almost all of them spoke of “bottoming out,” “stabilization,” or both.

The teams at Morgan Stanley and Bank of America Merrill Lynch resorted to the phrase “green shoots.”

Standard Chartered titled its research note “China - A glimmer of dawn.”

UBS dampened any hopes for a V-shaped or U-shaped rebound, and went, instead, for the letter L, saying any rebound would be “modest at best and nothing to write home about.”

And IHS Global Insight in Beijing commented that at least “those fearing a hard landing will be a ble to sleep a little better tonight.”

Top metaphor marks, though, go to Arthur Kroeber of the analytics firm GK Dragonomics, whose analysis this week of the challenges facing China concluded that the country needed to go on a diet: “For the last decade China enjoyed a delicious and fattening diet of cheesecake. This was all right for a while, but now the risk of arterial sclerosis looms, and a strict corrective regimen of broccoli is called for. It is not as tasty, but much healthier in the long run.”