<yardeni speaks with forked tongue since he's more a lackey than a legit economist, depending upon who is buttering his bread. alan greenspan put personal telephone call pressure on him in late april to tone down his recession dirty talk until at least latter part of july, and ed complied just like the lackey that he is.>
I'm not trying to pick a fight. I'm trying to clarify something.
Ed never changed his projection. An LA TIMES reporter wrote an article in March, and incorrectly implied that Yardeni downgraded his recession projection to 45%. He didn't. Unfortunately, many newswires pick up and ran the LA TIMES story. I guess many were anxious to believe that he lowered his projections. But, he hadn't.
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SPECIAL: LA TIMES DISTORTS YARDENI QUOTE
The Los Angeles Times on Friday displayed a clasic example of spinning the Y2K story the wrong way. The TIMES, in its article headlined "Awareness is Helping Cool the Y2K Fever" (by Ashley Dunn), claimed that Dr. Edward Yardeni had recently revised his estimate for a long global recession due to the glitch, from a 70% chance to 45%. This statement was included to back the premise that "Y2K experts [have] begun to recast [their] predictions of potential calamity into a tamer vision of the millinnium bug."
The TIMES made a major mistake. As Dr. Yardeni's most recent web update of March 7 shows (and as his office confirmed for us today.)
"As of March 1999, I still see a 70% chance of a severe recession". Yardeni broke that estimate down into levels of disruption, ranking the likelihood of a six-month recession at 25%, a "Major global recession lasting 12-24 months" at 40%, and a "depression lasting 2-5 years" with "social and political upheaval" at 5%, which aggregates to 70%.
The TIMES did not include the first level in their calculations. Dr. Yardeni merely broke down his prediction into levels of severity, rather than lowering the total likelihood.
In an e-mail to y2ktoday, Yardeni wrote, "You got it right. The L.A. Times got it completely wrong."
y2ktoday.com
y2ktoday was started by ex-CEO of United Press International (UPI)
Links to both the LA TIMES article and Ed Yardeni's 70% Recession report are both found at the site referenced above. |
