April 28, 2011

Personal Finance Decathlon at the Fed

Congrats to the AHS Personal Finance Decathlon team who placed 3rd out of 86 teams in the state. A job well done, and a very cool experience.

Photo Below: The team is in their pre-game meeting discussing strategy.
Photo Below: Team hard at work, discussing how the other team knows all the answers. And showing off their cool shirts.
Photo Below: Eating a great lunch in the Official Fed dining room. The team also had the pleasure of dining with Mr. Roger Sit, who manages over $8 billion dollars and is CEO of Sit Investments (one of the sponsors of the Personal Finance Decathlon.) To read the fascinating story of his father, Eugene, who fled communist China with nothing, read here.
Peace out, Fed.

April 27, 2011

AP Macro Foreign Exchange Market Activity

AP Macro Students:

Please read the following on reffonomics here and answer the following questions on the reading here about the FOREX Market.

When finished please review the following:

1. Loanable Funds Graph here.

2. Phillips Curve here.

3 The Money Market Graph here.

Due Friday, April 29th.

April 21, 2011

$5,000 an Hour For a Video Chat. Not Bad Work if You Can Get It

... and the Nobel Prize in Economics doesn't hurt your earnings potential as well. Expertinsight.com is a new website where economists and others charge money for an hour of internet chat.

Some of the fees for a one-hour video chat are:

Nobel economist Gary Becker: $5,000
Economist Steven Levitt (of Freakonomics fame): $3,000
Author Steven Dubner: $3,000
Political blogger Nate Silver: $1,000
Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron: $400

As Bloomberg reports:

"The site’s roster blends the interests and contacts of Adams, a top poker professional who taught undergraduates in Harvard’s Department of Economics for the past eight years. Adams, the primary research assistant for Michael Lewis’s book “The Big Short,” began giving one-to-one poker lessons over the video-chat service Skype in March 2010, charging $300-$400 per hour.

“I was amazed at how easy it was to drum up business,” Adams, a regular in some of the world’s biggest cash poker games, said in a telephone interview. “I realized that one-to- one teaching was a great opportunity to monetize content. What you’re doing is searching the world for that small slice of people, maybe 15 to 30, who are willing to pay a high price for your content.

Photo Left: expertinsight.com founder Brandon Adams.