Snow Days

Written by Caroline Shavel
Thursday, 10 February 2011 00:00

I can still remember the excitement that came with the prospect of a snow day back in elementary school. I would sleep with a spoon under my pillow and my pajamas inside out. I would even go as far as to flush an ice cube down the toilet in order to ensure school’s cancellation.

On the morning of a snow day, I would jump out of bed and run to my family’s chalkboard in order to plan a snow day schedule for my brother and me. Activities included playtime in the snow, some sort of board game, and a riveting game of hide and seek. As I write this article and look out the window at the ice storm that has been the cause of the most recent school cancellation, I can’t help but wonder — where did the magic of snow days go?

To start my snow day, I dragged myself out of bed at approximately 12:45 and found my mother eating lunch as I stumbled into the kitchen to prepare myself a frozen waffle.

From Bush to Obama

Written by Andrew Szabo
Thursday, 10 February 2011 00:00

In the financial panic beginning in 2007, the United States faced the most serious financial contagion since the Great Crash of 1929. The administration of George W. Bush must bear responsibility in part for helping to precipitate the great crisis we are now slowly climbing out of. Four areas of responsibility stand out. First, the decision by the SEC in 2004 to waive the “net capital rule” for the largest broker-dealers, subsequent to which some dealers such as Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs leveraged themselves up to an unprecedented degree. Second, a failure to rein in federal spending in relation to the across-the-board tax cut legislation of 2001 and 2006. Third, a policy of easy regulation of financial institutions, which ultimately was not consistent with the risk born by our government under FDIC deposit guarantees and federal agency backing of mortgage-backed securities. Fourth, a failure to recognize the gravity of the subprime lending fiasco and its economic impact until it was spinning out of control.

Ultimately, in the face of financial meltdown, the Bush Administration set all ideology aside and used government powers in novel and radical ways. These included the federal interventions in the Bear Stearns and AIG matters; the placing of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac under receivership; the implementation of the TARP plan to stabilize financial institutions and help clean up their balance sheets, with $700 billion allocated to buy bad bank assets; and federal bridge loans to General Motors and Chrysler Corporation. It is still unclear why the government decided to stabilize Bear Stearns but allow Lehman Brothers to fail, a fateful decision that led to much graver and more far-reaching repercussions than anticipated. Arguably, either we should have let both perish, under a bracing free market justification, or instead rescued and reorganized both.

President Obama reappointed Ben Bernanke as Fed Chairman, and under his leadership, Fed policy has remained extremely stimulative and interventionist. President Obama’s Treasury nominee, Timothy Geithner, continued and expanded large-scale federal stimulus and bailouts. In March of 2008, the Obama Administration made additional support available to the troubled car makers and also initiated the dubious “Cash for Clunkers” auto exchange. In February of 2009, Obama signed legislation implementing $787 billion of additional stimulus spending, focused on infrastructure, education, unemployment assistance and energy-related tax incentives.

President Obama used up enormous political capital in his first two years in office to enact the Health Care Reform Act. The result was disappointing. The legislation, however noble in purpose, and despite its response to a genuine social and moral dilemma, failed to change in any significant way the economic incentives that drive health care consumption in this country. It’s hard to envision how the vast savings in costs touted for the law will be realized. I strongly doubt this claim.

More reliable than the weatherman

Written by Joe Pisani
Thursday, 10 February 2011 00:00

When I was growing up on the East Side of Bridgeport, there was an ancient Italian woman in the neighborhood named Serafina, who looked like she could have been Julius Caesar’s homecoming queen.

She wore a gold horn around her neck to keep away evil spirits and encyclopedia salesmen, back before we had Wikipedia. When she wasn’t warding off vampires or burying fig trees, her greatest talent was her flawless ability to forecast the weather through some mystical interaction between changes in the troposphere and her bunions, which were so gnarled and scabby they looked like alligator skin and made grown men scream in terror.

While I’m not exactly sure how her bunions communicated meteorological data, I do know that every morning the women on Sherman Street would ask her whether it was going to rain or snow or tornado, and she was always right — long before the Weather Channel provided radar maps and 24-hour forecasts that are, despite their excruciating detail, usually wrong.

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Let’s start at the very beginning

Written by Larry Schneider
Thursday, 10 February 2011 00:00

Dear Larry,

A friend of mine was recently astounded to learn that I didn’t know how to delete one of my documents. Can you suggest some other basic functions I should know how to do on my computer?

J. R.

Dear J. R.,

I encourage everyone — n­o matter how new you are to all of this — to learn how to perform a handful of basic tasks. Just what those tasks are is subject to debate, but allow me to propose some here.