For release: April 2, 2003

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Marquette High Earns First Place in District "Fed Challenge"

ST. LOUIS, Mo. — A team of students from Marquette High School in Chesterfield, Mo., beat out teams from Louisville, Little Rock and Memphis to win the District "Fed Challenge," an economics competition sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. The Marquette students will go on to represent the Federal Reserve's Eighth District at the Federal Reserve System's national competition April 26-28 in Washington, D.C.

The students from Marquette are Silpa Kaza, Allison Hartman, Melissa Subramanian, Meghan Jones, Charles Wu and Lesley Boswell (an alternate). Their teacher is Eva Johnston and their coach is Paul Christopher, a global macro-strategist with Eclipse Capital Management.

A team from Germantown High School in Germantown, Tenn., came in second.

Each of the four teams made a 15-minute presentation based on research of economic conditions and then recommended a course of action for monetary policy. These presentations were made before a panel of judges in a mock Federal Open Market Committee format. The teams then answered questions based on their presentations and research.

The judges for the competition were William Poole, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; Rik W. Hafer, director of economic education at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville; and Stan Mengel, president and CEO of the Missouri Council on Economic Education.

With branches in Little Rock, Louisville and Memphis, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis serves the Eighth Federal Reserve District, which includes all of Arkansas, eastern Missouri, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, western Kentucky, western Tennessee and northern Mississippi. The St. Louis Fed is one of 12 regional Reserve Banks that, along with the Board of Governors in Washington, D.C., comprise the Federal Reserve System. As the nation's central bank, the Federal Reserve System formulates U.S. monetary policy, regulates state-chartered member banks and bank holding companies, and provides payment services to financial institutions and the U.S. government.

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