For release: April 8, 2004

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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 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 May 1-3 in Washington, D.C.

The students from Marquette are Lesley Boswell, Paul Boswell, Melanie Subramanian, Melissa Subramanian, Charles Wu and Chris Wedell. 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., a suburb of Memphis, came in second.

Each of the three 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 David C. Wheelock, assistant vice president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; Peggy Pride, advanced placement economics teacher at St. Louis University High School; and Bob Sorenson, professor of economics at the University of Missouri at St. Louis.

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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