The threats were crude enough - "We could be in power in three months," said one PQ candidate, "and we would be the ones writing the cheques" - and Bay Street is easily frightened. But if investment houses worry about being cut out of government business for speaking their minds, there's a simple solution: Don't sell their bonds. Two can play the boycott game, after all.

At any rate, the PQ has now found some brokerages whose forecasts it likes, and all is once again calm. Which brings us to the question of the day: Why exactly should anyone care what financial forecasters have to say? Anyone who needs the Bank of Montreal's chief economist to tell them a PQ victory would make capital markets queasy is either in the PQ or should not be investing without the consent of a parent or legal guardian.

It isn't just the shameless self-interest of so many forecasts (the same J. P. Morgan Securities that calls Quebec bonds a "buy" is part of a syndicate underwriting an issue of five-year Hydro-Quebec bonds on the London market); it's the inherent futility of the enterprise. Nobody knows where interest rates or stock prices are going, PQ victory or no. Never has, and never will. What forecasters can tell you, you already know. What you don't know, they can't tell you.

That hasn't stopped a vast army of modern-day soothsayers from camping around financial markets, a multi-million-dollar industry churning out completely useless predictions. Each day these are solemnly reported in the financial press, and every day the story is exactly the same: Either stocks will go up, or they will go down. Either the economy will speed up, or it will slow down.

Take this recent example, after the U.S. Federal Reserve raised its discount rate by half a percentage point. "It's a daring move," said an economist with a Chicago trust company. "Suppose the Fed is wrong and this recovery stagnates and goes into a recession. Boy will they look stupid." Yes, they will.

Unless, of course, they don't. "The Fed's strategy could work," offered a senior economist at Nomura Securities. "We could have a very moderate period of long- term growth and that would be wonderful." Yes, it would be. Unless, of course, we don't.

Countless economic studies have shown, and financial analysts to their dying breath deny, that capital markets are a "random walk." Anything we know now that might affect prices would have done so already: All information currently available is embodied in current prices. The only information that would move prices is information that is not now known - which is by definition unpredictable. Hence the common headline: Analysts Expect No Surprises.

This makes nonsense of "technical" analysis, which claims to divine exotic patterns in past price movements that would predict future trends. The basic quackery of this approach is often disguised by draping every possible outcome on a tree of conditional statements: "If the Dow goes to 4000, it will go to 4200; however, if it stalls at 3900, it will fall back to 3500; of course, if it drops to 3600, then we're set up for a classic head-and-shoulders movement back to 3800; but then, if . . ." But it's no more an advertisement for the respectable side of the profession, which scrutinizes the "fundamentals" affecting earnings. Some readers may be following The Wall Street Journal's "dartboard" contest, in which leading investment professionals pit their picks against a portfolio assembled by heaving darts at the stock listings. In 50 matches to date, the pros are ahead of the darts 29-21 - but they're dead even with the market average. No, it's not a scientific study. But you can bet the pros aren't posting these results in their newsletters.

The record is little better when it comes to forecasts for the economy at large. Every January, economists issue their predictions for growth in the coming year. These usually spray in every direction, from a decline of 2 per cent to a rise of 6 per cent. As the year wears on and the data trickle in, the revised forecasts start to converge, until by December they are predicting growth for the year just ended with devastating accuracy.

None of this is to indulge in the usual yobbish sneering at economists. The average junior professor at York knows more about the economy, as a subject of public policy, than all the journalists in the country put together. Yet their influence in debates about policy remains marginal, even as their forecasts are in constant demand. It is a cruel irony that the only time economists are listened to is when they don't know what they're talking about.