You mean that majority Republican congress that Bush led for over six years where he rubber stamped everything that got sent to his desk?

The X360 won't be cheap outside of US for us, retail will have larger profit margins.

 Ok . . .

The housing market is the way it is because all these bogus lones given out.  This was bound to happen in the long run and has nothing to do with the overall economy.  The economy could be amazing and the housing market would still have come to this because of all these companies feeding lones to people they knew could not pay them back.

Is anyone else actually, you know, worried about Japan? 5% is enormous when you're a multi billion dollar economy. Especially in 1 day. Nice to Blame Bush I suppose.

And MS pays the manufacturers in US dollars.  So the Chinese manu's make less overall with the declining dollar.  The price MS pays in dollars would likely be built into the contract between them, so no loss to MS there.

But here's the real issue: since the euro is so strong against the dollar, MS can (and has) dropped the price of the 360 in Europe while seeing less impact than it otherwise would have from the drop.  Course, if they had kept the price up and could have sold a satisfactory number of units that way going forward (which they couldn't), they'd just have been rolling in more $$ per console sold because each sale in euros means more dollars in profit.

The euro is pretty strong against the yen, too, though, so Nintendo and Sony aren't doing too badly either in their sales to Europe.  Sales to the US net them less, though, now that the dollar is increasingly worth shite.

But, that's a reason for Nintendo and Sony NOT to drop NA prices, if they can sell their consoles at an acceptable rate here without doing so. 

I could have sworn the 360 made in mexico?

Early units of the original Xbox was made in Mexico. Since then all production has been moved to China I believe.

For those of you who blame the President for the economy, please read this:

http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/L-presidentsresponsible.htm

It's a little explanation of the business cycle and who and what can affect it.

Also, you should probably have some understanding of the economy and how it works before making any kind of blame. I see so many comments and post about the economy on these forum from people who have no idea how the economy works.

Kazadoom - do you really think that everyone who criticizes George W Bush has no understanding of politics at all? Of course we realize that it's a complex world with numerous factors that all play together. It just so happens that the policies of the United States Government, which is led by the Republican party, whose leader is George W Bush is by far the most negative factor of them all. And George and his fellow party elite are the largest determining factor of those policies.

That's a good link, and thank you for posting it.

"His role in determining monetary policy is limited to nominating the members of the Federal Reserve Board. His role in determining fiscal policy is limited to cheerleading budgets through Congress."

But Bush did nominate Bernanke, the current Fed Chairman. Each of his first five budgets was submitted to a Congress that his party controlled. And his adminstration has overseen both increases in both miltary spending and non-military discretionary spending, and cuts in revenue, which has produced huge budget deficits and accelerated the growth of the national debt. To the extent that he has influenced the economy (and again, I agree that the popular imagination generally overstates this), it has been in the wrong direction.