In January, my Financial Advisor magazine column – titled "It's Yesterday Once More" – chronicled the almost eerie parallels between the current housing debacle and its forerunner in 1990-91, even down to the recapitalization of the banks in the wake of housing-related writedowns. Every catastrophist scenario from that earlier time – when the Dow Jones Industrial Average was well below 3,000 – is being recycled today, at 12,000, and nobody seems to see how utterly ridiculous that is.

That's the way the apocalypse works. It's always just different enough in the details to convince the weak-minded (and those operating without an adult memory) that this time is really differentƒthat this (whatever "this" is) is something new and uniquely terrible. When in fact it is nothing but a tattered old disaster scenario in a new suit.

The hobgoblins of 2008 are recession, oil and inflation. (That is, as soon as the recession is perceived not to have happened – with massive injections of monetary and fiscal stimulus having chased it from the door – journalistic catastrophists will immediately segue into inflation hysteria: the economy's shrinking! No, no, the economy's actually overheating!)

This being the case, I thought you might enjoy this Time magazine cover from October 1974, showing a harried President Gerald Ford and a list of his economic nightmares – you guessed it: recession, oil and inflation. Need I remind you that, in October 1974, the DJIA was around 700?

"That which has been is what will be," says the author of Ecclesiastes (1:9), "that which is done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun."

This cover can be downloaded from www.time.com, and should make an amusing mailing to some of your more alarmist clients, at just the right moment.