Module Extra Credit Posts for Fall 2025
September 17th September 15th I spoke for a few minutes about the Federal Reserve and the FOMC. This is bringing forward material from Chapters 10 and 11 because it is current this week. The Federal Open Market Committee decides on a target for interest rates. They meet every 6 weeks. The meeting go all day on a Tuesday, until lunch on Wednesday, and then they hold a press conference. This meeting will end before class on Wednesday, and will be discussed then. I did a quick Google search to show some headlines about what was expected. Most people expect them to drop their interest rate target by 0.25%. I stated that I wasn't quite so sure of that, and stated that my odds were 60/40, favoring no change at this time. September 12th The first thing I did was point out that FRED is a great keyword to use for internet searches for macroeconomic data. This is because it is the name of a free database (beware: most macroeconomic data for most countries is free, but there are...