Economics may be called the dismal science, but that doesn't mean that anyone who writes about it has to be dull.
With investment banks and fund managers publishing a library's worth of research daily, analysts struggle to stand out in a crowd or at least to grab their clients' attention. An increasingly popular way to get around the problem is to flex literary muscles and go for a bit of colour.
Something like "The End is Nigh," after all, is much more likely to grab attention as a research note headline than "U.S. Federal Reserve Getting Close to Peak Rates."
The granddaddy of this school of creative writing is probably Bill Gross, the fixed-income sage at U.S.-based bond giant PIMCO. He has been writing investment outlooks for 30 years.
Although they are often complex, as befits subjects such as monetary policy, many are almost surreal in their approach. Recently Mr. Gross quoted a 60s tune popularized by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young to illustrate imbalances in the global economy.
"We are stardust. We are golden. We are billion-year-old carbon. And we've got to get ourselves back to the garden," he noted the singers had sung.
Then he argued the case for the world getting back to a garden of economic prosperity and attractive investment returns.
"I write the way I talk, straightforward and, hopefully, easy to understand," Mr. Gross said. "I mean, what good would it be to write an advice column that no one could grasp?"
More recently, the scribes at State Street Global Markets, the investment research and trading arm of U.S. financial group State Street, have got in on the act.
"Researchers from St. Andrews University have discovered that the biomass of jellyfish now exceeds that of fish by a factor of four in the Benguela current off Namibia," readers were informed last month.
This, the research note went on, is known in science as a "regime shift." Just such a shift, it continued, has been happening in financial markets, where the pattern of investment indicates a flight to safety.
Elsewhere, analysts show a penchant for word play.
"The U.S. Civil War Battle of Bull Run . . . took place in July, the Pamplona bull run takes place in July and the bond markets have had their own July bull run," investment bank Calyon noted recently.
Some analysts also try for a bit of colour or humour in their daily market reports.
On Bastille Day, July 14, for example, Kit Juckes, Royal Bank of Scotland's head of bond and currency strategy, said investors should expect a tough day for stocks and bonds but a better one for the dollar. But first he treated readers to the entire first verse of France's national anthem.
In a similar vein, a critical ABN Amro overnight report noted that August was a time for "policy mistakes" by monetary authorities.
"That's what we call it when a central bank makes a decision that differs from our forecast," the economists joked.