For release: April 3, 2002
Contact: Charles B. Henderson, (314) 444-8311

Marquette High Students Win First Place at District Fed Challenge; Will Compete at Fed Challenge Finals in Washington, D.C.

MEMPHIS -- A team of five students from Marquette High School in Chesterfield, Mo., captured first place in the District contest of the Fed Challenge, an economics competition sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. They will go on to represent the Fed's Eighth District at the Federal Reserve's national finals May 4-6 in Washington, D.C.

The five Marquette students are Krystal Clay, Allison Hartman, Thomson Kao, Silpa Kaza and Melissa Subramanian. Theresa Chiu served as an alternate. Their teacher is Eva Johnston. The coach for the Marquette team is Paul Christopher, an economist for Eclipse Capital Management, Inc., an investment firm based in Clayton, Mo.

A team from Germantown High School in Germantown, Tenn., won second place.

Held at the St. Louis Fed's Memphis Branch, the District competition involved teams representing the St. Louis area (Marquette) and the Reserve Bank's branches in Little Rock, Ark., Louisville, Ky., and Memphis, Tenn. (Germantown).

Each team in the Fed Challenge makes a 15-minute presentation, based on their research, before a panel of judges at a mock meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee, the Federal Reserve's policymaking body. Team members also have to answer the judges' questions about their research and the Federal Reserve.

The judges for the District competition in Memphis were Dr. Bert Greenwalt, a partner in Greenwalt Company and professor of agricultural economics at Arkansas State University; Dr. Julie Heath, chairman of the department of economics at the University of Memphis; and William Poole, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of 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. In addition to serving as a bank for depository institutions and the U.S. government, each Reserve Bank monitors economic conditions in the District, participates in formulating monetary policy, and supervises state-chartered member banks and bank holding companies to foster safety and soundness of the District's banking and financial institutions and to protect the credit rights of consumers.

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