[taylan]

It has something to do with economics of punditry. Basically, for pundits incentives are against voicing dissent. If you go against the conventional wisdom and your predictions turn out to be right, you'll still have hard time getting your voice heard, since it will probably drown in a cacophony of "nobody could have seen this coming" type mainstream media flood. On the other hand, if you dissent from the crowd and turn out to be wrong, you'll be labeled a lunatic and sent to oblivion. So the punishment and the risk you're taking by far outweighs any possible rewards. Thus we get herding; pundits' predictions will always be closer to each other than they are to the real value of the thing being predicted.