Any landing you walk away from is a good one, but does that apply to China? It's an important question as the country risks a deep economic slowdown. The consensus view now holds that growth will be 7.7 per cent for 2012. Yet the definition of a "hard landing" is a moving target. Two years ago, it was defined as less than 8 per cent growth.
Since then, it switched to growth of less than 7 per cent and even 6 per cent expansion, or growth last seen during the Lehman crisis.
So let's turn orthodoxy on its head and assume China growth decelerates into 2013. Let's stay positive about China's long-term outlook, but accept the chance the economy is heading for this crash landing. The good news is that there are ways of trading into, and profiting from, this worst-case scenario. Read on.
Resource-rich Australia became economically entwined with commodity-hungry China 15 years ago. Its share of total exports to China has grown by a factor of six since 1995. Economic dependency, naturally, has also increased.
This can be observed in a number of ways: we can compare the performance of the commercial yuan - known as a non-deliverable forward - with the Australian dollar.
