Students from NLCS are through to the Area Finals of the Target 2.0 Interest Rate challenge against the Bank of England.
Every year over 300 schools nationwide take part in a competition to advise the Bank on Bank Rates and whether or not to increase Quantitative Easing. Each round is contested by approx 8 schools and is a ‘knock-out' so only the winning team goes through to the following round.
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The NLCS team this academic year consists of Milli Karlstrom (Chair), Miriam Capper, Louise Wyatt and Jennifer Xu as the four presenters and Jessica Taylor who was responsible for the PowerPoint presentation.
On Thursday 24th November the team attended Regus City Point to make their presentation to three judges, all of whom are specialists in their field at the Bank. The judges included Nils Blythe, formerly of the BBC, who is now Head of Communications. After their presentation, the team were questioned on the minutiae of their arguments.
The team argued that the MPC should look more carefully behind the headline data to analyse the possible underlying trends of the various sub-sections. This would give a better picture than aggregating everything together. For example, perhaps we need to consider last summer's graduates who are still unemployed as a separate category when analysing the workforce or hold back before pumping more QE into the banking sector until they have proved their compliance with the Project Merlin accord which promised additional lending to small firms.
The judges were sufficiently impressed with some of the arguments that they said they would raise them at the next MPC meeting!
The next round of the competition is to be held in February 2012.
Article: Milli Karlstrom (Yr13)
For further information regarding the competition click here.