Stupid Apple iPhone 3G Gift Card E-Mail

Today I received the e-mail below from Apple, stating that the best way to give somebody an iPhone 3G as a gift is to give them an iPhone 3G gift card. Sorry Apple, but if I'm going to spend a few hundred dollars on a phone, I want the recipient to open the frickin beautiful phone on Christmas morning, not some lame gift card.

My Solution to the Economic Crisis: Re-Ammortize All Qualified Motgages

My friend Zimran has a great and detailed post called "Macro: Under Construction" on his blog Winterspeak about the macro issues with the current attempts to solve the economic crisis. (Is this the official name for it, by the way? Economic Crisis (tm)). After reading this, I can't help but think that nobody really knows what they're doing with all this money that's being thrown at the situation.

Here's my response to his piece:

Hi Zimran. Nice post here. Here's my solution. Allow qualified homeowners to re-ammortize their current mortgage to 30 years at the current rates. This will lower monthly payments for those of us who are paying on time anyway and also pull anybody in an adjustable rate mortgage out of it.

And his Zimran's response:

The problem here is the word "qualified". At least in California, many homeowners cannot afford to make mortgage payments on a 30 year fixed, even at 5.5% (or whatever the conforming loan standard rate is these days). So, refi'ing people from adjustable to fixed will not help, they simply cannot afford the houses they are in.

Worse, it's not clear to what degree people will make payments on a house they are upside-down on, even if they *can* afford the payment. $1.5M houses are renting for $2K/mo here in Palo Alto. If house prices go down, anyone who is upside down on a loan like that will start to do the rent/buy calculation and decide to default (not that prices have gone down here yet).

There's about $3T of mortgage debt out there that will just never be paid back. The issue is not political, so who gets saddled with that is anyone's guess.

And my response back.

I understand, but it does seem helpful to try and lower monthly payments for those who are not totally upside/down and want to stay in their homes. They could do this themselves, but an expidated program sponsored by the government bailout money would be a quick way to trickle the money back into the hands of consumers.

Better yet, how about just eliminating tax withholding for the next six months? Why take the money from the consumers in the first place?