Financial Crises, Market Crashes, and Economic Depressions
Summer 2011
Jeffrey Parker
Course Information
Course Content
Class Format
Prerequisites
Office Hours
Assignments
Grading
Texts
Course Content
This course discusses some of the literature on pathological events arising in the financial sector and their interrelationships with macroeconomic recessions and depressions. Most of the emphasis will be placed on using cimple economic principles to explain and interpret historical events, both from the 20th and 21st centuries.
Class Format
The class meets from 9:00 to 11:00pm, four days per week (Mondays through Thursdays). All class sessions will involve discussion of the assigned readings. Sometimes there will also be presentations by individual students or groups of students on parts of the readings that are not read by all students. The instructor may lecture on basic economic concepts from time to time (especially in the first week) when this will facilitate understanding of upcoming readings.
Prerequisites
There is no prerequisite for this course. Students with a background in economics will, of course, find this relevant and useful at times.
Office Hours
The instructor will be available after class (11-12) on Mondays and Wednesdays in Vollum 229 to answer questions. The best way to contact his is via electronic mail at parker@reed.edu.
Assignments
There will not be any exams or major papers in this course. There will be two kinds of shorter written assignments and periodic oral presentations:
- For most class periods, each students will be asked to prepare a set of (3-5?) discussion topics relating to the day's readings. These can be topics that you thought were important, topics you didn't understand, or issues related to the readings that you think should be discussed in more detail than the readings covered them. You should write sentence/question or two about each of your selected topics. You will then be asked to raise your selected topics during the class discussion.
- About three short essays will be assigned approximately once every other week. These will involve discussing and integrating aspects of class readings. While there is no explicit page requirement or limit, essays should usually be in the range of three to five pages. For some essays, students will be asked to summarize the essence of their essays to the class.
- Students will be asked to make presentations, either individually or in groups, on sections of reading or to comment on another student's presentation.
Grading
Grades for the course will be based on the instructor’s assessment of each student’s understanding and engagement with the course materials, based on observation of class participation, presentations, and written work.