A thousand years ago, the hapless members of some Christian sects were convinced that the world would come to an end in the year 1000.

They were so certain of it that they didn't even bother planting crops in the autumn of 999. And when the world did not in fact come to an end, they starved.

In the 20th century those primitive Dark Age superstitions have been left far behind us. Or have they?

Technology 'the enemy'

An entertaining new book on theories of the apocalypse, "Living at the End of the World" by Marina Benjamin, points out that in America today, hundreds of thousand of people believe that technology is about to destroy us.

If you count A as 6, B as 12, C as 18 and so on, then the word COMPUTER adds up to 666 - the Number of the Beast.

This would be good for a laugh, if fear of computers were not growing ever stronger among people who think of themselves as much more rational.

The Millenium Bug is seen as the cause of, if not quite the end of the world, then certainly the end of the world as we know it.

We are told by the more pessimistic prophets that planes will fall from the skies, nuclear missiles will go off, medical equipment will stop working, the global financial system will grind to a halt: in short, that the entire fabric of our lives will collapse.

Now this may or may not all be true. The experts can't agree on how real the danger is, so it's impossible for the general public to know just how worried we should be.

Fears persist

Ed Yardeni, the New York-based economist for Deutsche Morgan Grenfell, examines a lot of the possibilities on his extensive and thought-provoking web-site at www.yardeni.com.

He's pretty concerned, and he has no particular axe to grind. But in a sense, that's not the point. What matters is that people are nervous, and are likely to get more and more nervous as December 31st 1999 gets closer.

And the one thing we know for sure is that the more people panic, the worse the problem will be. If people rush to fill their tanks with petrol and pile up tins of beans in their garages in the last week of December, then companies may be unable to cope with the demand.

Worst of all, if people try to take all their money out of their bank accounts and put it under the mattress, then the problem for the financial system could be severe.

A taste of the consequences

The Asian crisis has shown how corrosive a loss of confidence in the banks can be. In Japan at the moment the only growth industry is in sales of safes, for people to keep their money in because they don't trust their banks; and the economy is being slowly choked.

The banks are in fact among the businesses which are most likely to have got the problem sorted out in time.

The NatWest for example is spending £150m and employing 700 people in its fix, and is confident of being ready by the end of this year. But the problem is one of perception as well as reality.

Mixed messages

It is a real dilemma for the government to know what to do. On the one hand, businesses must be told: "Be afraid, be very afraid" so that they will do what they have to to get the problem fixed. But the general public must be told: "Don't panic" to head off the stampede reaction which would make the crisis much worse.

When you try to give two different messages to two different audiences, the danger is always that each audience gets the message intended for the other.