Lately I've gotten frustrated by my addiction to reading investment articles of the debt/doom/gloom genre, and it is a genre. Scary stories sell. They are a cheap way of drawing attention. In fact this technique is fairly universal. It keeps insurance companies in business; it's exploited by politicians in order to keep or augment their power; and it sells newspapers. ("If it bleeds, it leads.")
Doom-and-gloom might in fact be the only truly recession-proof industry.

If you watch a TV weather forecast, even in the desert Southwest, the "meteorologist" (who usually looks like a former model) tenses up her voice about a chance of rain, and then they break to commercial.

Long ago, environmentalists perfected the use of gloom and doom prophecies to scare people into their dream of a centrally-planned economy. (Planned by them, of course.)

In some ways I prefer the classic "End Times" warnings of Bible Christians to all of their secular imitators. Urban sophisticates on the coasts dismiss Bible thumpers as uneducated, gun-toting, hayseeds of the hinterlands, but actually a prophetic orientation shows a certain astuteness.

Religions that worship a holy book are quite vulnerable, in a way. Their Book is a stationary target that scientists, historians, archeologists and philosophers gradually pick apart.

And that is the remarkable utility of prophecy: it hasn't happened yet, so how can you disprove it? Not only that, but the wording leaves a lot of wiggle room. The longer the end of the world gets postponed, the more the suckers believe it.

It remains to be seen whether the Jeremiahs of Global Warming will profit from 2000 years of Christian eschatology and flim-flam. Can they use these time-honored cultural rhythms to their advantage, or will they be gored by real data? The only thing that I'm sure about is that if they run into problems they can skedaddle off--Elmer Gantry-like (*)-- to the next crisis du jour, and will even be introduced as "experts" on TV shows; their past record will be as forgotten as yesterday's news.

So why do I pay any attention to the doom and gloom crowd in the investment world? They are a countervailing force that serves to keep me from getting fooled by dishonest accounting, government cheerleaders, or the commission-earning boosterism of Wall Street.

And sometimes the doom and gloomers are right, even spectacularly so, such as the last two years. On the other hand, a broken clock gives the right time twice a day.

[*] Recently I saw the movie "Elmer Gantry", made about 1960, starring Burt Lancaster and Shirley Jones. Delightful. Lancaster deserved his Oscar.