Often we need to teach an economic idea that we do not have a thourough, practical understanding of ourselves. The old “Keep it Simple” model is usually the best method with which to confront this dilemma.

The idea of good investment strategies crops up from many angles during any economics class. Households need to make wise choices in spending their disposable income. Business firms need to be efficient in deciding their growth options. The government and the banking sectors have tremendous control on the “values of economics progress.”

One device that has aided me is the use of the accounting Ballance Sheet. Balance sheets are used in essentially all economics textbooks to convey the notion of “How the Banking System Creates Money.” Here’s a good example:

When my son Brian was nine years old, we started playing the Parker Brother’s popular game Monopoly. Both of us began with $1500 in CASH (Diagram 1).

• Items on the LEFT SIDE are things “Owned” - Assets. Notice initially all $1500 is in the form of CASH.
• The RIGHT SIDE contains things “Owed” - Liabilities. (Initially $0)
• Also on the RIGHT SIDE: by finding ASSETS minus LIABILITIES we find NET WORTH.
• The purpose of the game is to increase this NET WORTH.

As the game progressed, Brian’s strategy was to build up his CASH. For the first thirty minutes of the game, Brian had a huge smile on his face. He started to hoard the goldenrod colored $500 bills. Enamored by his cash stash, he even turned in smaller units of monopoly currency for more golenrod bills.

Brian, looking over at my side of the board, even as a nine year old, mockingly tuanted me. He noticed that I “owned” only a measly few white $1 bills, some pink $5 bills, and only one dull yellow $10 bill. Obviously, he thaught that he was winning the game over his dad. Zeroing in only on the CASH, he didn’t observe that I also “owned” three green, red and yellow property deeds. Also, he couldn’t understand the reason whyI had “spent” cash on those nine green plastic houses that were sprinkled around the board.

Our Balance Sheets now looked like Diagram #2. Brians’s strategy was to build his cash holdings. By landing on “PASS GO, COLLECT $200″, “You’ve Won a Beauty Contest, Collect $10″, and similar monopoly situations, Brian’s CASH grew and so did his NET WORTH (modestly).

However, the next thirty minutes were mine (I started to smile and Brian began to cry). As he landed on my “ASSETS” his goldenrod currency flowed my way as RENTAL REVENUE. It didn’t take long for Dad to win by bankrupting his son.

The final Balance Sheets showed the ory details (Diagram #3). Brian’s CASH was now in my possession; however, notice how my strategy of investing in REVENUE-producing assets enabled my net worth to expand. Brian was bankrupt, his net worth was zero.

This simple story has served me very well in both high school and universtiy level Economics and Accounting courses. By the way, Brian is now a 27 year old Emergency Medicine medical resident at Christiana Medical Center, Christiana, Delaware, and has bankrupted me in Monopoly ever since this first learning experience!

Op-Ed Contributor - Buy American. I Am. - NYTimes.com

So Wall Street has recently experienced its worst shocks since the great depression. Every day the Dow Jones is like a roller coaster, DOWN 800 points, then  UP 500 points, then DOWN 200 followed by another rally of 600! In just three weeks the Dow has gone from 11,500 to below 900 points. Surely, the wise thing to do is get OUT of the stock market, right? WRONG! At least, so says the richest man in the world, Warren Buffet, someone who should know a thing or two about smart investing.

Why?

A simple rule dictates my buying: Be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful. And most certainly, fear is now widespread, gripping even seasoned investors. To be sure, investors are right to be wary of highly leveraged entities or businesses in weak competitive positions. But fears regarding the long-term prosperity of the nation’s many sound companies make no sense. These businesses will indeed suffer earnings hiccups, as they always have. But most major companies will be setting new profit records 5, 10 and 20 years from now.

Let me be clear on one point: I can’t predict the short-term movements of the stock market. I haven’t the faintest idea as to whether stocks will be higher or lower a month — or a year — from now. What is likely, however, is that the market will move higher, perhaps substantially so, well before either sentiment or the economy turns up. So if you wait for the robins, spring will be over.

A little history here: During the Depression, the Dow hit its low, 41, on July 8, 1932. Economic conditions, though, kept deteriorating until Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in March 1933. By that time, the market had already advanced 30 percent. Or think back to the early days of World War II, when things were going badly for the United States in Europe and the Pacific. The market hit bottom in April 1942, well before Allied fortunes turned. Again, in the early 1980s, the time to buy stocks was when inflation raged and the economy was in the tank. In short, bad news is an investor’s best friend. It lets you buy a slice of America’s future at a marked-down price.

Over the long term, the stock market news will be good. In the 20th century, the United States endured two world wars and other traumatic and expensive military conflicts; the Depression; a dozen or so recessions and financial panics; oil shocks; a flu epidemic; and the resignation of a disgraced president. Yet the Dow rose from 66 to 11,497.

You might think it would have been impossible for an investor to lose money during a century marked by such an extraordinary gain. But some investors did. The hapless ones bought stocks only when they felt comfort in doing so and then proceeded to sell when the headlines made them queasy.

Today people who hold cash equivalents feel comfortable. They shouldn’t. They have opted for a terrible long-term asset, one that pays virtually nothing and is certain to depreciate in value. Indeed, the policies that government will follow in its efforts to alleviate the current crisis will probably prove inflationary and therefore accelerate declines in the real value of cash accounts.

Equities will almost certainly outperform cash over the next decade, probably by a substantial degree. Those investors who cling now to cash are betting they can efficiently time their move away from it later. In waiting for the comfort of good news, they are ignoring Wayne Gretzky’s advice: “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it has been.”

I don’t like to opine on the stock market, and again I emphasize that I have no idea what the market will do in the short term. Nevertheless, I’ll follow the lead of a restaurant that opened in an empty bank building and then advertised: “Put your mouth where your money was.” Today my money and my mouth both say equities.

Discussion Questions:

1. Why does holding cash seem like the smart thing to do during periods of volatile stock prices like the last month or so? Why does Mr. Buffet think that holding cash is NOT so smart?
2. Mr. Buffet’s advice is counter-intuitive to some. Buying more of something that is falling in value (American stocks) may appear unwise… but what is Buffet’s rationale for why buying now may in fact be the smartest thing for an investor to do?
3. Does the behavior of investors on the stock market reflect the behavior of consumers in a typical product market? In other words, do the laws of supply and demand apply to the stock market? Discuss…

Economists see financial bailout as necessary - Yahoo! News

Economists in the US are calling this week’s bailout of numerous US companies a necessary step in ensuring that no permanent harm is caused to the financial system and that we do not head into a deep recession.

The Treasury Department under the leadership of Henry Paulson is currently asking congress to move quickly on a bill that would provide $700 billion to the Department to buy up much of the bad debt that many financial institutions have incurred over the past years. Where’s this money going to come from? Since it doesnt look like the Bush Administration will be pushing for increased taxes anythime soon, Congress will have to borrow the money. 

Though most economists are agreeing that this is a necessary step in ensuring the integrity of the economy, I believe that it is important to look at how this additional debt may effect our government and economy in the future. So lets start with some numbers. The following statisitics are taken from the above article.

The deficit for this budget year, which ends on Sept. 30, is expected to rise to $407 billion, a figure that is more than double the $161.5 billion imbalance for 2007, reflecting what the economic slowdown and this year’s $168 billion economic stimulus program are already doing to the government’s books.

The Bush administration is estimating that the deficit for the budget year that begins Oct. 1, which will cover the new president’s first year in office, will hit $482 billion, a record in dollar terms.

And that forecast doesn’t include the $200 billion the administration committed to spending two weeks ago when it took over the nation’s two biggest mortgage companies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

And it doesn’t have any of the $700 billion the administration is seeking to soak up the bad mortgage-backed securities that have been at the heart of the severe credit crisis the country has been struggling with since August 2007.

The legislation the administration is now seeking to authorize the financial system bailout, according to a draft obtained by The Associated Press, would boost that debt limit to $11.3 trillion, up another $700 billion.

It is the rapidly rising debt that is cause for concern. The government is already spending more than $400 billion a year just to pay interest on the national debt. The higher that debt goes, the higher the government’s borrowing costs and the less it has to spend on other programs.

Discussion Questions:

1. What impact does the knoweldge that the government will bailout struggling financial firms have on investors willingness to take risks?
2. Should the government intervene in these finacial markets or leave the “invisble hand” to its own devices?
3. What are the opportunity costs associated with this decision?
4. What are some short term and long term implications of this bailout?

Question about the money multiplier - Welker’s Wikinomics Page

The following question was submitted by “blobber008″ to the discussion forum at our class wiki:

When I need to find the maximum increase in the total money supply, where the money deposited is $100 and the reserve requirement is 10 percent, do I multiply the total money deposited by the money multiplier, or do I multiply the excess reserves by the multiplier to find the increase, or does it depend on the situation? I thought that I would multiply the initial deposit by the multiplier, thus getting an increase of $1000. My answer key, though, said that increase is $900. When I asked my teacher, she said that you subtract out the original $100 from the $1000 to get the increase in money supply.

The reason I’m confused is that another question asking for an increase resulting from the Fed buying securities from the public doesn’t subtract out the original value. Do you do something different when dealing with money in a bank/checking account and the purchase of securities? Or, do I really subtract out the initial deposit? If so, can you explain why?

This is a good question and one that often comes up among students and even teachers via the AP Economics teacher email group.

The basic difference between an individual depositing $100 and the Fed buying $100 worth of bonds from a commercial bank is that when the individual deposits money, it was already part of the money supply. This is is why the amount of new money created is only $900 when an individual deposits $100 in the bank. We multiply the $100 by the money multiplier (1/required reserve ratio), and then subtract the original deposit, since it was already held by the public, thus part of the money supply.

In the case of the Fed’s purchase of bonds, on the other hand, the $100 of new reserves at the bank are themselves new money, since money held by the fed is not part of the money supply. In this case, we multiply the change in deposits by the multiplier, and the new money created includes the initial change in deposits, which came from the Fed.

Thanks for your submission, hope that helped!

Freakonomics: Monkey Business: Keith Chen’s Monkey Research

No I’m not talking about the latest freshman class at an Ivy League school… rather a group of monkeys at Yale that have been taught how to use money:

The essential idea was to give a monkey a dollar and see what it did with it. The currency Chen settled on was a silver disc, one inch in diameter, with a hole in the middle — ”kind of like Chinese money,” he says. It took several months of rudimentary repetition to teach the monkeys that these tokens were valuable as a means of exchange for a treat and would be similarly valuable the next day. Having gained that understanding, a capuchin would then be presented with 12 tokens on a tray and have to decide how many to surrender for, say, Jell-O cubes versus grapes. This first step allowed each capuchin to reveal its preferences and to grasp the concept of budgeting.

Turns out the law of Demand is not only true for humans but for monkeys too. When Chen “lowered the price of grapes”, monkeys would buy more grapes and less Jell-O, following the basic rule of utility maximization. Interestingly, the introduction of money led to more than just the simple exchanges of currency for candy and cucumber; the monkeys were also taught to gamble. Through their observations of several gambling scenarios, the researchers found monkeys tended to display “loss averse” behavior in games of chance, leading to an amusing conclusion:

The data generated by the capuchin monkeys, Chen says, ”make them statistically indistinguishable from most stock-market investors.”

Sadly, gambling was not the only vice that accompanied the introduction of money in to monkey society:

Then there is the stealing. Santos has observed that the monkeys never deliberately save any money, but they do sometimes purloin a token or two during an experiment.

But the debauchery does not stop with gambling and theft:

Perhaps the most distinguishing characteristic of money, after all, is its fungibility, the fact that it can be used to buy not just food but anything. During the chaos in the monkey cage, Chen saw something out of the corner of his eye that he would later try to play down but in his heart of hearts he knew to be true. What he witnessed was probably the first observed exchange of money for sex in the history of monkeykind. (Further proof that the monkeys truly understood money: the monkey who was paid for sex immediately traded the token in for a grape.)

As if we needed any proof beyond the widespread immorality and loss of values that distinguish many rich human societies, the steep decline of monkey morality observed at Yale can only be attributed to the introduction of currency! The implications of the Yale study on economics are clear: humans are not necessarily unique in our understanding of currency as a means of exchange. As long as money has imbued human societies, the wont to enrich ourselves through immoral means such as gambling, theft and prostitution has stained civilizations from ancient Mesopotamia to modern America.

When taught to use money, a group of capuchin monkeys responded quite rationally to simple incentives; responded irrationally to risky gambles; failed to save; stole when they could; used money for food and, on occasion, sex. In other words, they behaved a good bit like the creature that most of Chen’s more traditional colleagues study: Homo sapiens.

To make a more poignant observation, one thing is clear and disturbing, among the human societies today, Americans are most like monkeys when it comes to saving.

Discussion Questions:

1. Of the various functions of money, which role does money play for monkeys?
2. What gives the money used by the monkeys its value?
3. Discuss the evidence from this article suggesting that monkeys follow the law of demand.
4. What is the utility maximization rule and what evidence from this article supports the suggestion that monkeys follow this rule?
5. How are monkeys more similar to American consumers than to, say, Japanese or Chinese consumers?

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