Career in Elementary Education – Shaping the Lives of Children

Does the possibility of being surrounded by 20 to 30 children for 6 to 8 hours a day appeal to you? If so then a career in elementary education may be something to consider.

Perhaps you’ve always enjoyed working with children and wish to do this professionally. Maybe it’s the opportunity to shape the minds of tomorrow’s leaders. Could it be the chance at enjoying an extended vacation during the summer months? Whatever the reasons, you can benefit from learning more about an elementary education career.

What is Elementary Education and What Do Teachers Do?

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Banks and Monetary Policy: the Mechanics of Interest Rates Setting

We hear a lot about interest rates, and not only in my professional field of expertise. Interest rates are everywhere to be found in our daily lives: credit card interest, interest on deposits, car loan interest, personal loan interest, treasury bond interest. The other day I received a spam e-mail that said: “Need new socks ? Apply for our Family Loan – competitive interest rates”. Since I am single and own approximately fifty pairs of socks – they seem to be the preferred Christmas present in my household – I decided not to push the ‘Click Here’ button. But just what are the mechanics of interest rate setting? Who decides which interest rate to charge to whom – and how?

Paul Volcker, while chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (1979-87), was often called the second most powerful person in the United States. Volcker triggered the “double-dip” recessions of 1979-80 and 1981-82, vanquishing the double-digit inflation of 1979-80 and bringing the unemployment rate into double digits for the first time since 1940. Volcker then declared victory over inflation and piloted the economy through its long 1980s recovery, bringing unemployment below 5.5 percent, half a point lower than in the 1978-79 boom and helping Ronald Reagan convert the American people to Reaganomics. Volcker was powerful because he was making monetary policy. Central banks are powerful everywhere for the same reason, although few are as independent of their governments as the Fed is of Congress and the White House. Central bank actions are the most important government policies affecting economic activity from quarter to quarter or year to year.

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Taking stock: monetary policy transmission to equity markets.(analysis)

ONE CENTRAL ARGUMENT of James Tobin’s seminal 1969 Journal of Money, Credit and Banking paper was that “financial policies” can play a crucial role in altering what later became known as Tobin’s q, the market value of a firm’s assets relative to their replacement costs. Tobin emphasized that, in particular, monetary policy can change this ratio. This 1969 JMCB paper together with another of his contributions (Tobin 1978) became a key element in the formulation and understanding of the stock market channel of monetary policy transmission. Tobin’s argument in this work was that a tightening of monetary policy, which may result from an increase in inflation, lowers the present value of future earning flows and hence depresses equity markets.

The second part of Tobin’s argument, namely the relationship between monetary policy and equity prices, is still not very well understood. On the one hand, it has proven difficult to properly identify monetary policy, since monetary policy may be endogenous in that central banks might react to developments in stock markets. Considerable progress has recently been made in this respect. Rigobon and Sack (2002, 2003) develop a methodology that exploits the heteroskedasticity present in financial markets to identify monetary policy shocks, while Kuttner (2001) and Bernanke and Kuttner (2003) derive monetary policy shocks through measures of market expectations obtained from federal funds futures contracts. In this paper, we will employ a methodology similar to Bernanke and Kuttner (2003), by identifying monetary policy shocks through market expectations obtained from surveys of market participants.

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