CONTRIBUTORS

Cindy Perman
News Editor at CNBC.com and the author of The Pony Blog (ponyblog.cnbc.com). She has also written a book, “New York Curiosities,” and does stand-up comedy.
Jane Wells
CNBC business news reporter, based in Los Angeles, covering the defense and technology industries. She writes the CNBC.com blog Funny Business.

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The news can get a little heavy sometimes, with debt crises, vicious markets and crappy earnings reports. So, we dispatched our crack reporters, Cindy Perman and Jane Wells, to find some levity amid all this seriousness. May we offer you a Keynesian cocktail with a side of bacon?

Why a Pony? To be clear, there were no ponies harmed in the making of this blog. The blog’s name, “There Must Be a Pony In Here Somewhere,” comes from an old joke, a favorite of Ronald Reagan’s, that essentially means, with a pile of you-know-what this big, there MUST be a pony—a bright side—in here somewhere!

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May.06

3:03 PM ET

Wednesday, 6 May 2009

Enough With the 'Green Shoots!' Time for a New Term

Posted By:Cindy Perman

Topics:Stock Picks | Stock Market | Recession | Economy (U.S.)

Sectors:Food and Beverage

Companies:Google Inc | Starbucks Corp

“I’d suggest using a bad news/good news index instead — this would be a significance-weighted index of the ratio between the bad news and the good news over time,” Cohan suggested.

Tony Crescenzi of Miller Tabak suggests “troughs” as the new “green shoots."

“A trough more closely defines what has happened, because in the analogy of the plant, the trough occurs below the ground—there is no green shoot yet,” Crescenzi explains. “What we have seen is a slowing in the growth of the ‘recession,’ the hole in the ground. A green shoot only occurs when recovery takes hold—which it hasn't—the plant has not taken root; only the seed has.”

Brusca also stays with the gardening theme.

“There may be some piles of brown fertilizer to help things get going, once they germinate. But the green shoots have not poked though yet,” Brusca said, citing the fact that the ISM manufacturing gauge is still below 50, jobs are still receding and that spurt of consumer spending fizzled.

Kaczuwka takes her metaphor down the street to Starbucks. [SBUX Loading... () ]

“My [economic] indicator is the number of people in front of me in line at Starbucks,” Kaczuwka said. “It hasn't been greater than 1 in quite a while.”

OK, so quick recap. That’s:

Better good-bad ratio
More holes in the ground
Economic fertilizer
Pickup in the Starbucks line

Think one of these works as a substitution for green shoots? Or, think you've got something better? Send your suggestions to . We'll publish the best ones and vote on them.

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