The artifact chosen for this post is the final examination for William Poole’s monetary economics course at Johns Hopkins University in 1968. Not all artifacts at Economics in the Rear-view Mirror are long.
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William Poole’s Career
William Poole became the eleventh president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis on March 23, 1998, and retired March 31, 2008.
Poole was born in Wilmington, Delaware. He received a bachelor’s degree from Swarthmore College in 1959 and a master’s degree and a doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago in 1963 and 1966, respectively. Before joining the St. Louis Fed, Poole was Herbert H. Goldberger Professor of Economics at Brown University. He served on the Brown faculty from 1974 to 1998 and the faculty of Johns Hopkins University from 1963 to 1969. Between these two university positions, he was senior economist at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. He was also a member of the Council of Economic Advisers in the first Reagan administration from 1982 to 1985.
Poole has published numerous papers in professional journals and engaged in a wide range of professional activities. He has published two books: Money and the Economy: A Monetarist View in 1978 and Principles of Economics in 1991 (coauthored with J. Vernon Henderson). During his ten years at the St. Louis Fed, he delivered over 150 speeches on a wide variety of economic and finance topics.
In 1980 and 1981, Poole was a visiting economist at the Reserve Bank of Australia; in 1991, he was the Bank Mees and Hope Visiting Professor of Economics at Erasmus University in Rotterdam. He has served on various advisory boards of the Federal Reserve Banks of Boston and New York and the Congressional Budget Office. He is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, distinguished scholar in residence at the University of Delaware, senior economic adviser to Merk Investments, and a special adviser to Market News International.
Swarthmore honored Poole with a doctor of laws degree in 1989. He was inducted into the Johns Hopkins Society of Scholars in 2005 and presented with the Adam Smith Award by the National Association for Business Economics in 2006. In 2007, the Global Interdependence Center presented him its Frederick Heldring Award.
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Other relevant posts
Reading list for monetary economics, 1964 (JHU)
Modigliani and Poole’s MIT reading list, 1977 (MIT)
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The Johns Hopkins University
Political Economy 662
— Monetary Theory
W. Poole
Final Exam — 2 hours
May 27, 1968
Answer three of the four questions below.
- In principle It would be possible to “automate” monetary policy by deriving an optimal decision rule. Explain how such a rule might actually be determined, and what the difficulties of such an approach to monetary policy might be.
- Discuss the theory and the cyclical behavior of the term structure of interest rates. Is an understanding of this behavior likely to be of any value to the policy-maker?
- “It has been argued that lags in the demand for money function may off-set lags in the expenditure sector, thus leading to a rapid response of income to monetary policy actions. But this result depends on large interest rate fluctuations and such fluctuations are inconsistent with both the notion of a speculative demand for money and with the Meiselman learning model of the term structure of interest rates.” Discuss.
- “In a one-sector neoclassical growth model, money will affect the growth path provided that the money is outside money and that zero interest is paid on money balances. Therefore, a sensible growth policy is to prohibit payment of interest on demand deposits and to increase the rate of growth of the money stock.” Discuss.
Source: Johns Hopkins University. The Eisenhower Library, Ferdinand Hamburger, Jr. Archives. Department of Political Economy, Series 6, Box 3. Folder: “Graduate Exams, 1933-1965”.
Image Source: William Poole at the Federal Reserve Centennial, 2014.