{"id":1094,"date":"2026-05-27T12:14:14","date_gmt":"2026-05-27T16:14:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.clarku.edu\/magazine\/?p=1094"},"modified":"2026-05-27T12:14:14","modified_gmt":"2026-05-27T16:14:14","slug":"my-goal-is-to-make-my-students-better-informed-citizens","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.clarku.edu\/magazine\/my-goal-is-to-make-my-students-better-informed-citizens\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018My goal is to make my students better-informed citizens\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-text-color has-gray-200-color has-alpha-channel-opacity has-gray-200-background-color has-background\"\/>\n\n\n<div style=\"color:inherit\" class=\"eyebrow  has-text-align-left\">syllabus<\/div>\n\n\n\n<p>COURSE: Money and Banking<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>TEACHER: Edouard Wemy<\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-text-color has-gray-200-color has-alpha-channel-opacity has-gray-200-background-color has-background\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Most of the students in Economics Professor Edouard Wemy\u2019s Money and Banking class do not own homes. They haven\u2019t launched careers, started families, or invested heavily in the stock market. But those things are coming, and Wemy wants his students to be prepared for them by better understanding U.S. monetary policy. \u201cMy goal is not to convert my students into economists,\u201d he says, \u201cbut to make them better-informed citizens.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Each year you prepare students to participate in the Fed Challenge at the Federal Reserve Bank in Boston. Describe what that is.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignright size-full\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1201\" height=\"1555\" src=\"https:\/\/www.clarku.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/90\/Edouard_Wemy_17_Feb_2026-29.jpg\" alt=\"Edouard Wemy\" class=\"wp-image-1096\"\/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>The Challenge is an activity created by the Federal Reserve system that gives students in different regions of the country an opportunity to compete against each other by making a policy recommendation about whether the Fed should increase or decrease interest rates. Faculty from the various schools are the judges in each region\u2014we compete in the Northeast region against schools like Harvard, MIT, Babson, and Boston College. The winner actually gets to move on and make their pitch to the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. You really have to know your stuff to get that far. Preparing for the Fed Challenge used to be part of this class, but I\u2019ll be teaching it as a separate Problems of Practice course next semester.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>How much about money and banking do students typically know when they enroll in this class?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This is an elective, and there are prerequisites to taking this class, so students know the basic concepts of how the economy works\u2014how we compute GDP (Gross Domestic Product) and CPI (Consumer Price Index), international trade, labor issues, etc. We have to lay the foundation first, but they\u2019re obviously showing some level of passion for the subject. I think a lot of students take it because they want to understand money. People like to talk about money.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Do<\/strong>&nbsp;<strong>they have any misperceptions about money?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I guess their view of money is different from the way we think about it in the macro economy, and that\u2019s an interesting part of it. When they come to the class, they need to learn about the role that money plays in an economy and how it is used to generate economic activity, or at least to manage economic activity. I would say they don&#8217;t understand that the money supply is controlled by the Fed. They may hear in the news that the Fed increased or decreased the interest rate, and we\u2019ll have a discussion about the impact that the rate can have on day-to-day decisions. The goal of economics is to understand the world around you so you can make better financial decisions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>They need to be able to have a sound understanding of interest rates and what money is \u2014 and how money is created \u2014 before we move on to talk about how the Fed uses the tools in their toolbox in order to influence economic activity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Besides a learning curve, there must be something of a \u201clife curve\u201d to all this as well.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>[Laughs] A few years after they\u2019ve graduated, former students will email me and say something like, \u2018Now I see why you kept talking about GDP and inflation in class.\u2019 All of a sudden, it becomes relevant.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Do you ever wade into the politics surrounding the Fed leadership?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>None of my courses revolve around politics, but politics and economics are intertwined, so those issues are hard not to get into at some point. I ask my students if they are paying attention to what&#8217;s happening in the news with regards to how the administration is behaving toward the Fed chairman. Once they understand the importance of what the Fed does, then we can move on to why it is important to have an independent Fed. The independence of the Fed is something that over time has been relatively unchallenged, and now it is not. But there are reasons why it\u2019s structured this way, because monetary policy impacts the lives of millions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Economics Professor Edouard Wemy wants his students to be prepared for launching careers and owning homes by better understanding U.S. monetary policy. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":1230,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"departments":[5],"issues":[32],"class_list":["post-1094","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","departments-red-square","issues-spring-2026"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v27.7 (Yoast SEO v27.7) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-premium-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>\u2018My goal is to make my 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