Reed College
Reed College

Economics 341

Monetary and Fiscal Policy
Fall 2014
Jeffrey Parker, Reed College
Policy Simulation

I'll keep updating the following list of bullet points as new information becomes available:

  • The monetary policy simulation will be held at Lewis & Clark College on the afternoon of Tuesday, November 11. 
  • The San Francisco Fed staff has set up a Web "course" at www.schoology.com through which they will provide support materials for your research. Monitor this site regularly, but also search broadly for information in your briefing area and more generally and current monetary policy alternatives.
  • Reed will provide 4 groups:
    • Megan Keating, Alicia Molina, Xian Ng, Dutton Smith-Wellman, Justine Wang
    • Noah Atchison, Ieva Dalbina, Carlo D'Amato, Flozzie Randari
    • Brian Click, Nick Fiore, Alex Freitag, Diego Sosa-Coba
    • James LaBelle, Robyn Popp, Jayanth Shankar, Cole Sprague
  • The first-listed person in each group is responsible for convening an organizational meeting on Monday, October 27, or Tuesday, October 28. After that, the internal organization of the group is up to the members.
  • On Wednesday, October 29, we will have a lottery to allocate choices for briefing topics and FOMC roles. Each group should have discussed their preferences before then.
  • The briefing topics to be covered by Reed groups are:
    • Current real activity: GDP, industrial production, and capacity utilization
    • Exchange rate, international balances, and foreign economic conditions
    • Fiscal policy and government budget situation
    • Long-run growth considerations: capital formation and productivity growth
  • Your briefing should focus on current conditions in your topic area and what those conditions imply for monetary policy.
  • One of the Reed groups will play the role of Vice-Chair Stanley Fischer. Others will be selected from other members of the Board of Governors and the regional Federal Reserve Bank presidents.
    • The 5 current members of the Board of Governors (there are two vacancies) are discussed here.
    • Information about the regional back presidents can be found here.
  • If your early discussions suggest that your group will take a particular position on monetary policy, you may want to choose a role that fits with your recommendation. (For example, FRB presidents Fisher [Dallas] and Bullard [St. Louis] have at times disagreed with other members of the FOMC about monetary policy.)
  • Past minutes and monetary policy statements of the FOMC can be found at http://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/fomccalendars.htm.
  • Links to all of the 12 regional bank sites are at http://www.federalreserve.gov/otherfrb.htm. Most of these have a "current situation" set of charts and tables linked from the front page. Check them out!