Review of Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research Livestream 9/27/2024
I recently watched a live stream done by Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. They left it live stream recording so you do have to skip around some to the actual speakers. I got some pretty valuable information that I decided to document here. This is the link to the entire session https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJrynrsVXjM
The initial intro speaker was Professor Peter Demaro. He starts around the 21 minute mark.
The first major speaker was Tim Chen who is the founder of Nerd Wallet. His intro starts around 24 minutes in. If you are interested in what Nerd Wallet is and what their about it is a good listen.
The next speaker of interest was Professor Michael Boskin. he starts around the 2 Hour 2 minute mark.
Following Prof. Boskin, Assistant Professor Greg Buchak who teaches about Mortgages which I found super interesting. His talk started around the 2 Hour and 48 minute mark. Greg was there with Andrew Jack who works for the Financial Times. This was the first one that I think most people in the US might find interesting.
After Greg there was a panel of several members from the Military Schools such as the Air Force Academy and West Point. That panel starts at the 4 hour and 52 minute mark. For anyone interested in how the Military is looking at educating the Military officers this would be of interest to you.
Cindy Mazow who is the Assistant Director of the Learning Experience Design starts around the 6 Hour and 12 minute mark. She discusses how they go about designing their learning tools.
One of the most useful sessions for me was Dr Diego Mendez-Carbajo. who is a member of the St Louis Federal Reserve started at around the 6 Hour 22 minute mark. Diego brings up FRED which I have seen screenshots of and we probably have all heard the data that is sourced from this. FRED is a database which has a ton of useful information for all kinds of reasons. You can see pretty up to date information on things such as the current 15 and 30 year Mortage rates in the US. One of the places he recommends checking out is the FRED Blog. Or you can just do searches. Additionally they have a portion dedicated for people who provide teaching and training to others and even has a newsletter. I highly recommend watching that portion. Here is the current tracking of the 15 and 30 year loan.
Some of the most valuable resources was discussed by Diane Chen from the Institute of Consumer Money Management (ICMM). She starts talking around the 6 Hour and 32 minute mark. For those with kids and young adults she brings up the NOVA Personal Finance Lab which provides some labs to help teachers train using gamification. A lot of specialist spent a lot of time to put these together utilizing Behavior Economics. And this is free to utilize! Her topic is on gamification with learning in general. She also mentions another site with gamification https://www.ngpf.org/arcade/?id=10. I am not sure if that one is free or not.
Terrance Odean was the next speaker. He starts at the 6 hour and 49 minute mark. He is a teacher at UC Berkeley. He speaks mostly about Engagement tools. Terrance also have a Youtube Channel with a ton of personal finance videos. He also showed the tool to analyze fees https://www.finra.org/investors/tools-and-calculators/using-finra-fund-analyzer. This is an awesome tool and this is an example of comparing SPIAX and SWPPX which both track the S&P500. And here is a screen shot showing comparisons as well.
Definitely a wide variety of speakers. The most significant for me was the Mortgage portion, the CEO of Nerd Wallet, Finding out what FRED was, and finally the Gamification available for teaching others via NOVA and NGPF.
Thanks for taking the time to read! Love to share things I learn. And if you are looking for some one on one personal finance help and training you can take a look at this page.