The past ten weeks has been fun and educational for me! On a personal front,
not to be dramatic, but the discussion from Module 2 may have changed the
course of my life. After running the numbers for the area and home value that
my partner and I were looking to buy in a few years, we realized that it may not
make sense financially. We played around with the spreadsheet, variables, and
knowledge from that lesson (Time Value of Money and Interest Rates) and
actually decided on an entirely new state that we want to move to and a
different financing approach!
The macroeconomic variable that I think corporate financial managers should
be preparing for in the next 5 to 10 years is the rising rate of inflation.
However, since I did see some other class members post about this already,
another impactful macroeconomic variable that I would like to touch on is
fiscal policy. When the government wants to expand or control economic
output, they can implement policies (like increasing taxes or lowering
government spending) to ramp-up demand and spending in the economy (Hall,
2022). While there is no drastic fiscal policies currently implemented, it is
critical for corporate financial managers to proactively monitor this space.
This way, if a future policy affects parts of their business: like consumer
demand, the cost of doing business, investment decisions, or their ability to
compete; they can respond and adjust in a timely manner (Brunot, 2016).
References:
Brunot, T. (2016, October 26). How do fiscal policies impact the retail
business? Small Business - Chron.com. Retrieved January 19, 2023, from
https://smallbusiness.chron.com/fiscal-policies-impact-retail-business-
73966.html
Hall, M. (2022, December 19). Explaining the world through macroeconomic
analysis. Investopedia. Retrieved January 19, 2023, from
https://www.investopedia.com/insights/macroeconomic-analysis/
