Today's NYT Business section has an excellent piece by Michael M. Grynbaum on the hyping of rumors, estimates, and other financial froth in public. Amid some interesting stats on the routine errors of "stock analysts" and other frequently quoted pseudo-experts, this paragraph arrives:

"These are volatile times. There's a lot of moving parts here, and nobody can quite figure out how they all mesh," said the investment strategist Edward Yardeni. "You're hearing a lot of catastrophic predictions."

From 1997 through the late fall of 1999, Yardeni was among the most-quoted alarmists warning that Y2K was going to bring the sky crashing down because computers would misread 2000 as 1900. A Nexis search will readily turn up hundreds of citations from Mr. Yardeni around the world, especially in the countdown year of 1999. "Many thought of him as chief alarmist," wrote Guy Dixon of Toronoto's Globe and Mail on Nov. 30, 1999:

As early as September, 1997, he warned that potential Y2K computer problems, if left unchecked, would be a "serious threat to the global economy."

By November, 1997, when most people had yet to figure out that "Y2K" stood for "year 2000," he was warning the U.S. Congress of "worst-case disruption scenarios," causing "a global recession, possibly one of the longest and deepest on record."

In October 1999, Dixon went on,Yardeni "finally declared himself 'no longer an alarmist about Y2K,' but instead merely a 'skeptic.' Still, Yardeni went on in his monthly report, "I am concerned by the increasing complacency. Instead of preparing for still-plausible worst-case scenarios, government and business leaders have convinced the public to expect the best possible outcome."

With a month to go, Yardeni still thought the odds of a recession were 70 percent.

I bring up this embarrassment because Yardeni, now running his own analysis company, is still one of the major go-to guys in financial journalism. The Nexis database records 187 major newspaper citations from him during the past two years, including the prophecy on January 6, 2008, that the dollar would strengthen this year. Well, there are still five months to go.

Nothing personal against Yardeni, though his case does seem especially hilarious. There's a larger point. Our news organs are cacophonous with predictions--political predictions, economic predictions, financials, sports, you name them. It's an absurd game, and casts disrespect--or deserves to--on actual journalism, the journalism of what is knowable. The same experts are quoted again and again with--so far as I can tell--no regard for their records. Evidently, sources, once anointed, never expire.

Reporters should clean out their Rolodexes at least once a year, don't you think? Maybe Christmas week, instead of filling the airwaves and dead trees with their New Year's predictions.