Everything You Wanted to Know About Finance but Were Afraid to Ask
We will survey selected topics taught in a Finance 101 course, including financial principles, government finance and personal finance, as well as an analysis of the financial impacts of the Covid-19 crisis on both personal and public finances. The course will include an analysis of the response of the Federal Reserve (and the huge increases in the debt held by the central bank) as well as the dramatic increases in Federal Debt to help mitigate the impacts of the crisis on the economy. Principle of finance will also be applied to how individuals respond to significant declines in equity markets. By the time the class is held we'll have some sense of how much the market has recovered, if any. If time permits, we will look at the structure of derivatives and tail risk and the long history of financial market instability. You will learn how ignorance of these phenomena led to the financial panic of 2008-9 and the Great Recession.
Arnold, Michael
Mike Arnold is co-founder of ALCO Partners LLC, a small consulting firm founded in 2004 specializing in the measurement and management of interest rate risk in the banking industry. In 2012, he was invited by the UC Dept. of Economics to teach the honors course in intermediate macroeconomics, which he did through the spring of 2016. In 2015, Mike began teaching in the Osher Life Long Learning Institutes at Dominican University and Sonoma State. He has developed courses on the US Economy, the Bay Area economy, personal finance, international finance and Tariffs and the Republican Tax Plan.