Finance Homework

Assignment # 1 Summer 2015

Topic: The Fed's Impact on the Financial Markets

Due Date: June 11th

In Module 2, we are focused on the Federal Reserve: its organzation, its main role, goals and targets, and its tools. For this assignment, you will look for and review:

· Latest FOMC Federal Open Market Committee, the policy making body of the Fed) minutes which is a detailed transcript of what happened at the last Fed meeting, and staff and Governor's outlook for financial markets, economy and future expectations. The latest minutes as of now is from April 28-29 meeting and was released in May. Many ways to find it. Make sure you look at whole transcript and not the summary.

· Find latest speech or comments made by Chair Yellen AFTER the meeting in April. She speaks frequently and CNBC picks up her comments so should be very easy to find. Also, find what analysts have said about Yellen's comments.

In a 1-2 page writeup, discuss:

1) key economic conditions that the FED is looking closely at and its significance to their policy as to whether they are going to raise interest rates in 2015;

2) From your reading of the material, how does the FED's action impact financial markets (bonds, stocks, money markets);

3) Has Chair Yellen's recent comments (and feel free to explore other members of the FED eg Gov. Brainerd who has spoken to CNBC other day) changed from last meeting? How?; and

4) You can use any opinions written by financial experts (you can find their analysis on CNBC, CNN, Marketwatch et al) just make sure to footnote or provide sources.

Note: As this is a writing intensive class, please take care with writing grammatically correct, capitalize where needed, and full sentences. No slang.