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November 06, 2007
Fed Reserve's creative FedVille !
Risk Mgmt and Compliance is generally all serious business, albeit I am sure we all do come across some colorful characters, incidents that provide the much needed breaks, extra spice and humor to the profession. Occasionally I try to seek out expressions of creativity, innovation and humor in the financial markets.
Whilst researching on creativity and innovation in markets, I came across a creative offering around financial literacy from Fed Reserve and found it fascinating enough to blog on this, even though other bodies too have done this e.g. Stock exchange simulations, FX markets games etc.
Probably much before we started to rave about banks having a secondlife.com presence, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, FRBS created its own little virtual town - FedVille.
FedVille is a friendly virtual town built just for kids by Fed Reserve San Francisco. At every corner of FedVille there is something interesting to learn and experience around financial sector literacy be it at the FedVille Deli, FedVille firehouse, FedVille Movies, FedVille General Store and even a Federal Reserve Bank to tour !
http://www.frbsf.org/education/fedville/
FedVille teaches kids about pocket money, bank savings account opening, track growth in money, watch movies on money, bust counterfeit notes and take on tellers jobs in an easy and engaging way.
Other online resources being:
- Fed 101 – The life of a dollar bill, The life of a cheque, Where’s the Money, Examiner for a day, Fed president interviews, Games – Fed clue etc.
- Great economists treasure hunt
My favorite:
- Fed Chairman Game - Allows one to decide rates, policies for every 3 months period and follow its impact across a tenure of 4 years.
This game allowed me to emulate the role played by the legendary Alan Greenspan for a few minutes, albeit I am sure that my former b-school finance professor who now serves as a State Secretary of Budget and Fiscal Management would shudder at even this thought.
http://www.frbsf.org/education/activities/chairman/
Jokes aside, the above innovation learning concept adopted by Fed Reserve made me think hard on how any kind of next generation Risk Mgmt & Compliance architecture needs to help enable such innovative Risk mgmt learnings tools given that the future of learning is linked to more interactive modes of videos, podcasts, wikis and blogs.
Also we do need a healthy dose of creativity and innovation to make Risk Mgmt & Compliance concepts simpler and easier to be understood by everyone, and more importantly make the Risk learning interactive and fun experience !
Posted by spachava at November 6, 2007 05:55 AM
Dear Sai,
Very interesting blog, keep it up! Sunando
Posted by: Sunando at November 6, 2007 10:29 AM
Lively like the author! Sai, why dont we xcopllaborate and create one such creative offering !
Yours
Satchidananda
Posted by: satchidananda at November 18, 2007 03:59 PM
Sai, you make some very good points. As I read your blog I had to think of the online news article I read this morning concerning the Freddie Mac $2B loss. I quote from the article "Buddy Piszel, chief financial officer, said Freddie Mac is moving to stem losses.
'We have begun raising prices, tightened our credit standards and enhanced our risk management practices,' Piszel said. 'We also continue to improve our internal controls.'" I know his comments were basically soundbites for a pesky reporter, no doubt. But I had to ask myself, what does he really mean by "enhance our risk management practices" and "improve our internal controls?" Ideally, one would hope he would apply some creativity and innovation to his enhancement and improvement process. One could argue that the current subprime mortgage mess is a result of the same old improvements and enhancements applied to existing risk management programs. We all need to start thinking outside the box or history will continue to repeat itself and lessons will not be learned.
-Joe
Posted by: Joe Knepper at November 20, 2007 03:39 PM
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