NY Fed Rewards Half-Truths [Financial Awareness Video Festivals]

[Lucille]

I didn't even know the NY Fed had a video contest. Can it get any more ridiculous?

The New York Fed's video festivals are sponsored by the Regional and Community Outreach team. By combining peer-to-peer learning with video technology, the festivals seek to advance financial literacy among young adults. The New York Fed is running two concurrent festivals: one in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, and one in Puerto Rico. In each region, local college and university students are challenged to create a 30-second video—aimed at young adults—about how to build good credit.

http://reason.com/blog/2013/02/20/ny...ds-half-truths

Last week the Federal Reserve Bank of New York named the winners in its Financial Awareness Video Festivals. The winning videos were both vague and succinct. None of the videos made any mention of the role of government in financial decision-making.

The annual contest is run in the tri-state area of New York/New Jersey/Connecticut and in Puerto Rico. The tri-state winners are students from LaGuardia Community College, whose video “Repair your credit -- Repair your life” aimed to remind young people that good credit allows for people to take advantage of opportunities they wouldn’t otherwise have.

Irony doesn't even begin to describe the Fed's involvement in any effort to inspire, encourage, or reward financial responsibility.

As individuals when we experience a drop in our credit score we figure out why it happened and remedy the issue in an effort to restore the faith financial institutions have to lend to us. Why then, is the government not doing the same thing?

Instead our credit rating has been demoted twice, the bonds held by the lender of last resort are no longer looked at as a financial safety net, and the regional banks are just standing there.
[...]
The idea that this institution can accurately judge what it means to be financially responsible was not depicted in the winning video or by any of the finalists. If no one brought this up, how helpful are these videos?

The video ended with a young man trading his chefs hat for a blazer and saying "It's worth it in the end because new doors opened up and new opportunities come along," but imagine if instead he said, “Ending the Fed is worth it in the end, we’ll know what our time and money are really worth.”

Individual responsibility is important, but the Fed recognizing only those who tell part of the story by just advocating for greater personal responsibility, and not leading by example, sends the wrong message.

[Occam's Banana]

Last week the Federal Reserve Bank of New York named the winners in its Financial Awareness Video Festivals. [...] [The] winners are students from LaGuardia Community College, whose video “Repair your credit -- Repair your life” aimed to remind young people that good credit allows for people to take advantage of opportunities they wouldn’t otherwise have.

[seraphson]

...about how to build good credit

How to build good credit? How to build good credit?

Let's see. Have very little regulation enabling individuals to conduct businesses with as little overhead cost as possible. Have low taxes to emphasis this. Use money that represents value instead of debt in that it also cannot be inflated. Promote the natural ebb and flow of free (or free as possible) markets to enable the proper signals to be sent so interest rates can properly dictate savings and capital investment. Stick with everything thus far for about half a century or more to obtain the best productive nation even when compared to other nations with a population ratio of (US) 1:3 (Asia). Instill a central bank. Amend a bill to enable said bank to buy t-Bills in exchange for Reserve Notes. Expand government, especially with heavily Socialist premises and ideas that cost a lot of money. No old bad deals here nothing but good new deals! Debase the currency to hell to the point of creating a system that fools your debtors into thinking everything's okay by allowing nations abroad to redeem gold (and to making the local patsies think your programs are sustainable). Expand government even more, again under heavily Socialist premises. In fact this would be the time to take a stand to make a great society! End the priorly established system as you pissed away so much money on previously mentioned programs that you have but no choice to establish a quasi-petrol dollar backed through violence and force. Enable several boom-bust cycles to occur in certain parts of the economy. Throw the ball in the roulette wheel, watch it go, where it stops nobody knows! Oh I don't know what'll it be?! Stocks, computers, or housing would be sure shots and when all else fails even bigger government programs to fix previous programs can get you to the top! When all else is done simply buy up mortgage backed securities and treasuries at the tune of about $90 Billion a month. And that my friends is how you build good credit. I think. Am I doing it right? Is this thing on?