HSI transforms from ugly sister to Cinderella Hong Kong's economic story this year began as a nightmare and looks like ending in an improbable fairytale.
Sixteen months ago the economy was mired in recession - joining the newly impoverished club of its Asian neighbours - and its stock market was behaving like a kamikaze pilot hell bent on hitting Earth.
On August 13 last year the Hang Seng Index had reached the Satanic level of 6,660. Third-quarter gross domestic product growth was at minus 6.9 per cent.
Then came the Government's unprecedented stock market intervention - which halted the decline in its tracks but brought howls of protest from the free marketeers who warned that Hong Kong risked being lumped together with Malaysia as a pariah of the capitalist world.
The first two quarters of this year brought little hope. The stock market took off in March but the rally fizzled out and it bumped along between 12,000 and 14,000 points until November - a range it had last found in the spring of 1997.
Analysts joined in a chorus of warnings that we were bouncing along the bottom of a valley as wide as it was deep - the recovery, they chimed, a distant prospect.
