Even with their all-seeing satellites, weathermen are not much better at predicting a tornado than soothsayers or old farmers. The same can be said for economists and depressions. But with the far-sighted Sony chairman predicting an imminent collapse of Japan's economy, Tokyo is rife with warnings that another depression is about to hit Japan and Asia. PNS associate editor Yoichi Shimatsu, former editor of the English-language Japan Times Weekly, reports from Tokyo.

TOKYO -- Economic depressions are like tornadoes -- unpredictable and terrifying. Whereas recessions and approaching storms give us time to shutter the windows, depressions descend from the clouds like the finger of some ancient god, striking for no purpose apparent to mortals.

Yet now, some seven decades after the Great Depression hit, predictions are swirling around Tokyo that another, of possibly equal intensity, is gathering strength over Japan and Asia.

Marc Faber, chief of a Hong Kong-based emerging market fund, says the Asian crisis is wreaking unimaginable havoc, and economist Ravi Batra has said he expects the depression to hit Australia and Canada, and to level the wildly overbought Wall Street market within a year.

This, they claim, is why the International Monetary Fund is dropping sandbags filled with dollars into the Indonesian vacuum, why Congress backed down from its no-bailout stance, why Clinton demands that Japan do something -- anything. And it is why the Japanese prime minister is hiding in a storm cellar.

Warnings have also come from Noria Ohga, chairman of Sony, the smartest and most far-sighted enterprise in the galaxy. He said recently the Japanese economy is about to collapse, and called Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto another Herbert Hoover.

Hoover, U.S. president at the time of the 1929 crash, is widely blamed for tight money policies that made the downturn worse. Economic historians these days are less critical of Hoover, and note that Roosevelt's New Deal did not turn the time, either -- and many also admit they still don't know what actually caused the Great Depression.

Depressions have a life of their own. They are conceived in the financial bubbles of overvalued markets and suck energy from streams of idle savings -- and then, on a day when there are no buyers for the many sellers -- fear is unleashed. That's when money loses its value, and wheelbarrows-full are needed to buy a loaf of bread, as happened in Weimar Germany in the 1930s.

Sony chair Ohga's dire warning carries a sense of deja vu. Two years before the 1929 crash, the Tokyo stock market plunged, setting off a chain reaction. Then, as now, Japan was a major trading partner in Southeast Asia. The loss of Japanese trade, especially with India via Singapore, rocked a financially over-stretched British empire. In turn, Western European elites pulled their investments out of Germany and New York,

Then and now, Japan's crises were triggered by apparently benign technological innovations. In 1927, rayon -- a synthetic fiber -- replaced silk in stockings and lingerie -- Japan's largest export industry.

Today another advance -- electronic data transfer that moves money at light speed around the globe -- has obliterated the vast treasuries of Asia and threatens to stop Tokyo's drive to become a world-class financial market.

Globalism was supposed to speed the flow of people, goods, money and information -- but more and more, globalism has come to mean the movement of lightening images, such as the numbers on airline tickets or credit card bills.

Likewise, bankers -- once anchored in notes and bills -- were cast adrift when their industry became papers. Now the financial instruments with the highest returns depend on velocities that preclude paper, except as an afterthought.

The Asian crisis, as the Malaysian leader Mahathir Muhammed points out, was triggered by foreign exchange speculators and emerging funds that could pull billions of dollars out of Southeast Asian economies in a matter of minutes.

Now 97 percent of the world's business is in such financial transactions, and only three percent involves "real" investments in factories and other productive facilities, according to Chandra Muzzabar, the Malaysian political scientist who heads the Just World Trust.

Corporations, too, have been burned in the new electronic markets.

These cumulative losses mean that banks, many of them technically bankrupt, must call in their short-term loans to companies. The companies must then come up with paper money, and quickly, or go out of business. So it is that profitable companies in Indonesia and Thailand are being forced to shut down by the hundreds.

Are these, in fact, the first tremors of another Great Depression? It is impossible to tell. But even an undisputed winner like Sony sees a "Very, very difficult year" ahead.