WASHINGTON — The world economy normally runs like an immense game of musical chairs in which the music goes on and on.
But the music was expected to slow at least in some places Friday night either as computers grappled with the changeover to 2000 or as people took the precaution of not overworking them.
As the date change circled the globe, no immediate catastrophe was reported and experts were increasingly confident that none would occur.
But there remained the intriguing question: What if the music doesn't return to its usual rhythm, with computers resuming normal operations and the world getting back to its normal frantic pace? That, experts say, will take weeks to answer.
"By the time this is all over, we should know a lot more about how dependent we are on information technology and how closely woven we are globally," said Bruce W. McConnell, director of the United Nations' International Y2K Cooperation Center. "We may be considerably more of both than we'd realized."
The economic world always takes a breather at New Year's but nothing like the whopper it was taking--mostly out of caution--at midnight Friday. Trains were being stopped in their tracks. Planes were being kept from the sky. Ships that normally would be headed to port were cruising just outside territorial waters.
With so many activities slowing so dramatically, the planet faced a big job just getting back to normal.
"It could be that everything goes smoothly but I'm skeptical," said Edward Yardeni, chief economist of Deutsche Morgan Grenfell in New York and an early Y2K pessimist. For all the talk by countries and companies about having fixed the computer glitch, he said, "we've never stress-tested the system and we don't really know how it is going to do."
What we do know is that the most cataclysmic scenarios seemed to be slipping into the realm of "might-have-beens" by Friday night. The darkest worries fell into three broad categories and there was little evidence in the hours leading up to the New Year that any of them was coming true.
* Technological apocalypse: Some experts had warned that computers, virtually all of which use two digits instead of four to represent the year, would get confused when the calendar flipped from "99" to "00" and start shutting down lights, phones, factories and financial systems around the world.
