Skip to content

Fed Games

Fallback Image

Happy Fed Day, Bafflers! This afternoon, the Federal Open Market Committee will announce its policy statement and projections, in Janet Yellen’s first meeting as Federal Reserve chair. Exciting stuff! (The Business Insider even has an ominous-looking countdown clock on its home page.) We thought we’d take this occasion to pluck a very special piece from the Baffler archives and publish it online for the first time.

In Issue 19, Jim Newell wrote about the time he spent participating in the Fed Challenge, an economics competition for high school students. Newell and his teammates had to give an economic-policy presentation to, and then answer a barrage of questions from, Federal Reserve board governors Ben Bernanke and Ed Gramlich, and Dallas bank president Bob McTeer. They had to be knowledgeable, quick, and not sweat through their suits. Or giggle.

Here’s an excerpt of his essay, “I Was a Teenage Gramlich”:

Our team spent the winter preparing, and by early spring, we’d advanced through two regional rounds in Baltimore and the district finals in Richmond, avenging the honor of our scorned schoolmates from the previous year. Richmond was a close call. This one defiantly Southern judge nearly quashed our bid, calling us “cocky” and telling us to stop being so “New York”—an odd criticism of a group of teens from suburban Annapolis. . . .

On top of that, Peter and I had been struggling for weeks with the problem of giggling—giggling!—in the middle of our presentation whenever we made eye contact. This giddy attack of the nerves hadn’t disappeared even by the time we were preparing in the Federal Reserve cafeteria, leading Josh at one point to grab Peter by the lapels, hold him against a wall, and say, “YOU BETTER NOT RUIN THIS.” In fairness, we could appreciate his alarm—this was a small but significant step along his path to the U.S. presidency. No one giggled when George W. Bush made the case for extended tax cuts for the wealthy, after all—and it would certainly strain all sorts of credulity to have our judges imagine our respective real-life models, Alan Greenspan and Ed Gramlich, adjourning Open Market Committee meetings amid uncontrollable bursts of hysterical laughter.

Read his essay, “I Was a Teenage Gramlich,” in full here.