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Lame Duck Challenge Ends With Free Codeweavers Software For All
gzipped_tar writes to tell us that The Codeweavers "Great American Lame Duck Presidential Challenge" has ended in surprise and free software all day Tuesday (October 28, 2008) at the Codeweavers site. A while back Codeweavers gave President Bush a challenge to meet one of several goals before he left office. One of these goals was to lower gas prices in the Twin Cities below $2.79 a gallon, which has since transpired. "How was I to know that President Bush would take my challenge so seriously? And, give the man credit, I didn't think there was *any* way he could pull it off. But engineering a total market meltdown - wow - that was pure genius. I clearly underestimated the man. I'm ashamed that I goaded him into this and take full responsibility for the collapse of any savings you might have. Please accept our free software as my way of apologizing for the global calamity we now find ourselves embroiled in."
I think that this was a good marketing ploy. I hope their servers can stand the strain.
"What kind of retard thinks that one of the responsibilities of the president of the United States is to control the price of gasoline?"
The kind that is smarter than you?
The President of the US is supposed to make policy that positively impacts the economy, who doesn't have the dollar drop lower and lower every stupid mistake he makes and doesn't squander a sound financial market with instability by overextending our reach into areas of the world that have no effect on us. Doing almost exactly the opposite of what this idiot has done would have strengthened the dollar...gas prices might actually have gone up, but a strong dollar would have meant that we are paying less for what the rest of the world is paying more.
A good president is a figurehead...not a wannabe dictator. One that inspires markets and not one that destabilizes them. A good president doesn't need to actively do anything to the markets...he leads with sound policy and the markets react accordingly.
Personally, high gas prices affected me a little, but as you said, you make choices in what is important. Cable TV was less important than being able to travel (and in this time, I discovered Hulu which I formerly thought sucked...much cheaper than cable!) So many ways to live differently in this economy...but it still means we have to make choices we didn't a few years ago.
That's the magic of P2P - no need for massive bandwidth on the part of the original source.
One thing you can always count on is the ineptitude of government.
That being said... The President of the US actually has very little to do with the economic health of the nation. See below:
SeekingAlpha
American Spectator
Mackinac Center
Further, most experts agree that the *actual* problem of this current market collapse stems to four things:
#1 - The CRA expansion in 1995, which put 30% more people on the housing market than there should have been, creating an incredible sellers' market in which housing, which previously had roughly paced inflation, spiraled up until people were looking at "house value" increases of over 200%.
#2 - The change in the Fed's policy when Alan Greenspan was appointed chair, which changed from relatively aggressive use of the Fed Funds Rate to deflate economic bubbles and contain damage (the cause of the late-'80s "recession" for example) to allowing bubbles to grow and grow under the idea that lowering the Fed Funds Rate after the fact would "clean up the mess" and that there would be "better growth" under the bubble... unfortunately economic bubbles are more like cysts or abcesses than blisters.
#3 - The abrupt change between a far-too-liberal and far-too-conservative method of valuing a lot of mortgages. Prior to the Enron debacle and Sarbanes-Oxley reforms, the "valuation" of many of these loans (which were being used to back other securities which in turn backed more securities) was at 100% of the loan hidden in "tier 3" assets (e.g. "things we can't put a price on at this second so we'll estimate it and get back to you later) on most companies' balance sheets. This is called "mark-to-model."
Post-SOX (and coming to today because it takes years for large companies to bring everything in line with new reforms like that), the companies were required to mark the mortgages to their actual market worth (e.g. what they could get if someone bought the mortgage from them this minute). Unfortunately, since they were all being massively marked down as someone tried to PUT a market worth to them, there were suddenly MASSIVE amounts of these loans on the market, and as a result they were getting marked down to literally pennies on the dollar. This shift to "mark-to-market" accounting on the loans is what pulled the rug out from underneath a lot of other securities whose backing could be traced back to them, as well as requiring the banks (which had been using these loans as collateral on the balance sheets) to start holding back a lot more capital to service their existing accounts.
There needed to be a middle ground in this, but there wasn't.
#4 - The 1999 dissolution of the 1933 Glass-Steagall reforms, which had previously prevented investment banks from owning other financial institutions, caused much of the "piling-on" of securities backed by other securities backed by other securities backed by... well, it turned out, nearly-worthless (in the mark-to-market sense) loans.
The only part Bush plays in this is that he (a) signed SOX (which passed nearly damn unanimously from the Congress and could easily have been a Veto Override anyways) and (b) he let Greenspan, and then Greenspan's hand-picked successor, run the Fed.
P.S. I'm not a fan of Bush by any means, but fair's fair - he doesn't get the blame for this one and I'm a bit disappointed in the person who posted this and the person who posted an ill-considered, ill-thought, ill-informed rant on this contest.
Thank you Codeweavers. You deserve a huge round of applause.
*** Don't be dull.***