I think that I’m supposed to know who Congressman Barney Frank is, or what the chair of the House Financial Services Committee does, but I didn’t before reading the agenda: apparently, he oversees laws and regulations that apply to financial services and housing sectors in the US. I’m not sure if that means that we can blame him for both SOX and the sub-prime mortgage crisis. 🙂
He gave us the Idiot’s Guide to Sub-Prime Mortgages, a more elegant version of this, and discussed what’s likely to happen in financial markets in the short term (government continues bailing out the financial institutions). He was a pretty entertaining speaker: he joked that he would go to whoever managed to find the funds for the war in Iraq, and ask him to find funds to resolve some of the more pressing domestic issues. He also stated that he believes that the Homeland Security-driven initiatives to put security guards at all big office buildings in New York to check your ID does nothing to actually improve security, to some audience applause.
After seeing a pro-Democrat video at the start of the day that included Barack Obama riding a unicorn, this was a fitting end to the day. I think we know how Pega’s management leans, politically speaking.
Alan Trefler came up to close the conference, summing up the sessions that we’ve seen over the past two days, and showed a video montage of the past two days that (unfortunately) included the chicken dance episode on last night’s cruise.
That’s it for PegaWorld for me. Good content, lots of energy, and definitely worthwhile.
Sandy,
Thanks for blogging the conference!
I missed the video of Barack Obama riding a unicorn, but I’m told it was this JibJab video from earlier in the year. JibJab’s aim is to make fun of all; it’s sort of subjective whether you feel that it makes fun of one candidate more than the other. (Obama’s been a challenge for satirists to make fun of here– generally, the rub is that he’s too saintly, hence the unicorn. It may have also come from Bill Clinton calling his campaign a “fairy tale” during the depths of the primary season).
I don’t blame you as a Canadian for not knowing Barney Frank! There’s certainly been a lot of finger-pointing in the U.S. on SOX and subprime-lending, and I’m glad he didn’t get into to that. There will still be complaints about SOX, but I think Frank is onto something that the political climate here has shifted towards wanting more regulations, not less. And as a “rules” vendor we won’t complain about that!
That’s exactly the video, thanks!