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To: Cactus Jack who wrote (45059)	12/12/2001 5:20:19 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 65232

Fed Cuts to Aid Economy, Not Set It Afire Wednesday December 12, 4:47 pm Eastern Time By Caren Bohan WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Cuts in U.S. interest rates to 40-year lows are expected to help pave the way for an economic recovery by early 2002 but analysts caution that rip-roaring growth may not resume any time soon. Every recession is unique but many economists say that in some ways, the pattern of the current downturn will mirror that of the last recession of 1990-91: a mild contraction followed by a gradual recovery. ``Ten years ago, people talked about the jobless recovery. This one could start off in a similar kind of vein,'' said chief economist Bill Cheney of John Hancock Financial Services. Things were different back in 1980. Then the United States saw a steep contraction followed by huge pickup in growth. This time around, Cheney said, ``it will be hard to get a quick pop in growth.'' On Tuesday, Fed policymakers trimmed overnight lending rates by a quarter point to 1.75 percent, the lowest since 1961 and the first time in 40 years short-term rates have been below 2 percent. It was the 11th move in one of the most aggressive rate-cutting sprees in Fed history. The speed of these rate reductions has contrasted with the caution of Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan 10 years ago. Greenspan took heat at the time for bringing rates down too slowly. Fear of inflation stayed his hand back then, but in the current downturn inflation is very low and expected to stay that way, giving the Fed wide latitude. FED CAUTIOUS ON OUTLOOK Still, there are limits to how much mileage the economy may get out of the rate cuts, some observers said. ``It is going to be a sluggish recovery,'' Jerry Jasinowski, president of the National Association of Manufacturers, told a news conference on Wednesday. Short-term rates are now comfortably below the rate of inflation as measured by the Consumer Price Index, which is running at a 2.1 percent on the year. So-called negative real interest rates -- those below the rate of inflation -- are considered to be highly accommodative to economic growth. Yet the Fed itself has given no indication the economy is about to sprint ahead. ``To be sure, weakness in demand shows signs of abating, but those signs are preliminary and tentative,'' the Fed said as it announced its latest rate cut. The central bank said the economic risks were tilted toward weakness ``in the foreseeable future.'' Such verbiage is the Fed's way of indicating it may not be done cutting rates. Some economists think Greenspan may give the economy one more dose of his rate-cutting medicine, perhaps lowering borrowing costs another quarter point early next year. But bond market interest rates have been heading higher for weeks, reflecting sentiment that a recovery is near. ``That normally means we're going to see a resumption of growth,'' said Chris Rupkey, economist at Bank of Tokyo/Mitsubishi in New York. ``It doesn't necessarily give us a time frame for when that will occur.'' The National Bureau of Economic Research, seen as the arbiter of U.S. business cycles, has pinpointed March of this year as the beginning of the recession that ended an unprecedented period of economic expansion. U.S. gross domestic product contracted 1.1 percent in the third quarter and is widely expected to have shrunk again in the final three months of the year. In the latest survey by Blue Chip Economic Indicators, 59 percent of private forecasters projected that the recession would end in either February or March of next year. But the consensus forecast depicted a tepid recovery. The Blue Chip economists pegged growth at 0.4 percent in the first quarter and 2.6 percent in the second. Growth was seen picking up to 3.8 percent by the third quarter. One year before the recession began and right around the time the ``Internet bubble'' burst in the second quarter of 2000, the economy was careening ahead at a nearly 6 percent pace. It regularly logged growth rates of 4-percent plus in the late 1990s. Still, Rupkey said the growth rate of 3 percent he expects by the end of next year constitutes a respectable pace even if it doesn't match the boom times Americans became accustomed to during the expansion. ``Our expectations for what constitutes good growth are kind of off the map and off the norm,'' Rupkey said. One bright spot in the outlook, he noted, was that the economy, while still weak, is shaking off the shock of the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The attacks brought commerce in some economic sectors to a virtual halt for days and sent consumer confidence tumbling. But sentiment has been staging a modest comeback lately, with three straight monthly rises in the University of Michigan's consumer sentiment index through December. ``People had gotten too pessimistic after the attacks, thinking that there would be no bottom to this (downturn),'' Rupkey said. But he added, ``a lot of ducks are lining up in a row for a recovery.''

To: Cactus Jack who wrote (45059)	12/13/2001 2:12:49 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 65232

'Green Eggs and Taliban'... starnews.com

To: Cactus Jack who wrote (45059)	12/13/2001 3:20:23 AM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 65232

Cable Firms Prepare for Demise of '@home.com' By Christopher Stern Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, December 13, 2001; Page E06 Last week, AT&T Corp. scrambled to restore high-speed Internet service to more than 850,000 customers who suddenly lost it early on Dec. 1. The interruption was not caused by a storm or other natural disaster; it was the result of a corporate showdown between AT&T's cable unit and financially troubled At Home Corp., the cable industry's leading Internet service provider. AT&T had been planning to buy At Home, but at the last minute it decided to switch its entire customer base to its own high-speed network -- a tremendous undertaking for which the company had spent months preparing. It did not go off without a hitch, and there are still some customers without high-speed Internet connections. But still, many industry observers were impressed by AT&T's ability to make the transition in less than six days. "It was not the car wreck it easily could have been," said Cynthia Brumfield, chief executive of Bethesda-based Broadband Intelligence. AT&T Broadband attributed its success in making the move to AT&T's 100 years in the telephone business. "That's the benefit of having a parent company in the network business," said Sarah Eder, a spokeswoman for AT&T Broadband. But building and managing a high-speed network is a departure for much of the cable industry, which has depended on At Home for the past three years to handle its Internet traffic. There are 6.4 million homes and businesses that reach the Internet through high-speed cable lines. The supercharged access to the Internet is a byproduct of the cable industry's efforts in the past several years to upgrade its lines to provide more television channels. Even with the additional TV channels, those cable lines have plenty of room for Internet traffic. Each system allots at least a single channel for high-speed Internet use, but additional space on the network can be set aside in neighborhoods with a concentration of Internet subscribers. Cable companies such as Comcast Cable Communications Inc. are trying to follow AT&T's lead in switching their customers from At Home to their own networks. Under a court-approved agreement with At Home, the companies have until Feb. 28 to move their customers from At Home's network to theirs. As Comcast and others make the switch, they have to acquire and install equipment to store and retrieve information and routers to direct packets of data around the Internet. Most cable companies handle their customers' data traffic for only a small portion of its journey to the Internet -- from the time it leaves their subscribers' modems until it reaches the cable companies' local office. Those offices, also known as head ends, hand the data off to At Home or another Internet service provider for the rest of the trip through cyberspace. But before the data or a request for data reaches the Internet, it makes a quick trip to regional data centers, now still controlled by At Home. It is there that e-mail is collected and stored and copies of frequently visited Web sites are warehoused. The goal is to keep frequently accessed information as close to customers as possible. That way, when Internet subscribers call up a popular Web page, they don't have to wait for the information to travel through the entire Internet to reach their computer. They just view the copy stored regionally. Any data requests that cannot be filled at the regional data center are forwarded to the proper destination. Now that At Home is scheduled to go out of business in a little over two months, cable companies are building their own regional data centers and connections between the centers and the Internet. If all goes according to plan, the data centers will be up and running well before the Feb. 28 deadline. Comcast's Washington area subscribers are set to be moved to the new network during the third week in January, said Dave Watson, Comcast's senior vice president of sales and marketing. Watson said subscribers will enjoy new benefits as a result of the changeover, such as the ability to read e-mail from any computer with Internet access, not just the one hooked up to the cable system. They each also will be allotted up to 25 megabytes of storage in Comcast's regional data center for personal use. Once the move to the new network is completed, each subscriber will download new software that will provide them with a new e-mail address. The first part of the address will remain the same, but the part after the "@" will be "comcast.net" instead of "home.com." The "home.com" address will continue to work until At Home shuts down on Feb. 28.