The Bailout Game

[PhilB66]

The game provides an amusing, multimedia retrospective of the measures that the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve have taken in response to the economic crisis.

Players get to guide Treasury Secretary Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke down Wall Street, making decisions about which institutions to save and which to let fail.

The game changes with the choices a player makes. The goal is to make it all the way across the board without running out of bailout money or ushering in a recession -- or worse. Players who get stuck can even seek advice from former Federal Reserve chief Alan Greenspan.

Test your bailout skills here: http://www.thebailoutgame.us

(Source: http://bailoutsleuth.com)

[mouser]

This game is not realistic.  For more realism it should have:

• Some schools and hospitals begging for money and the treasury guys saying "we have no money!"
• Pictures of the billionaires using the bailout money to buy upgrades for their yachts so they can more quickly deposit their profits into overseas banks.
• A rule where if a corporation says the magic words "we are too big to fail" then you have to give them as much money as they want.
• A rule where you lose the game and are fired if any taxpayer ever finds out where the money went.
• A rule where you are only allowed to play the role of somene distributing money if you can prove you used to run one of the banks or mega corporations that the money is going to, or if you promise to be the ceo of one of these corporations after you leave public office.

[housetier]

The whole bailout thing is not realistic.

Why give money to people who have proven they do not know how to handle it?

[Deozaan]

The whole bailout thing is not realistic.

Why give money to people who have proven they do not know how to handle it?

-housetier (January 15, 2009, 10:58 AM)

It is realistic because it's happening just like what mouser described right now in the USA.

It's not logical, but it's happening.

[raybeere]

As a game, it's funny. In real life...

It seems that in the finance industry, you get rewarded for failure just as much as you get rewarded for success. When I go to a mechanic, I expect them to fix my car. If I took a perfectly good car in, and the engine was ruined within three miles after I left because they thought they'd pick up a little extra cash charging me for the time they spent doing random crap in there, I wouldn't pay them a cent - I'd sue their butts off.

I don't think there are any companies out there hiring programmers who can't write a working line of code. Well, only the big ones. So why should anyone accept it when some jerk in a suit essentially says "I got greedy, I screwed up - now you've got to pay to get me out of this mess." If I were President, I'd give them two choices. One, they figure out how to solve the mess themselves, without taxpayer help. Two, they prove they made such a huge mess it really will drag down the country - then they're guilty of treason for endangering the country. Harsh? Hey, I'm not the one who decided to hold a whole country full of people hostage unless I got a truckload of cash.

I guess all we can do is laugh about it, since the folks we elected don't seem to care. Still, the game wouldn't be realistic unless it had you wringing blood from a bunch of ordinary taxpayers to fund all those nice private jets so the "elite" wouldn't have to mingle with us peasants. So the whole thing is both ridiculous and the cold, hard truth, all at once. The best summary I've seen was the Halloween cartoon of a girl walking around inside a toilet, saying "I'm going as seven hundred billion dollars." Maybe that ought to be the point of the game; see how quickly you can flush a boatload of cash. But then you've still got to squeeze the folks who don't have it so you can give more to the folks who already screwed up and lost it, or it won't be realistic, either. Oh, hell, I don't think there's a way to make a game out of this that is at all realistic. The most absurd games have rules that make more sense than what's happening right now.