Tuesday, May 18, 2004

The Fed Today

As Scott pointed out to me recently, although it may have only been two cents, Ruddy Ruddy has nevertheless reached a new milestone by receiving money in the mail. Perhaps it is because the authorities want Ruddy Ruddy to be able to be able to responsibly handle his new financial windfall, then, that the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia helpfully sent along an informational video to explain how the Federal Reserve System works.

I recently had the pleasure of playing host to my neighbour Elizabeth -- an official Ruddy Buddy -- and was proudly showing off my stack of as-yet-unopened mail to Ruddy Ruddy. She was intrigued by a thick airmail package from the aforementioned Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, and suddenly thinking that they might have sent money, so was I. We opened it up to find a bubble-wrapped videotape called The Fed Today, and decided that it was an excellent time to hold a screening.

And, well, it was an informational video. Over the course of its 13 minutes, we learned a great deal of stuff we never even thought we cared about (and as it turns out, we still don't, but we learned it anyway). Elizabeth learned about inflation. I learned that the United States once had over 30,000 types of currency, which was issued by any organization who wanted to issue it, including drugstores. Elizabeth pointed out that some people probably got paid a lot of money to make that video, considering that it basically just repeated all the information from the brochure that came with it.

Host Charles Osgood, for example, probably picked up a hefty paycheque. However, we agreed that he earned it, as he wore a snazzy bowtie and turned out to be a surprisingly good host -- broadcast television-quality, even, I thought, comparing him to Charles Kuralt. Perhaps that shouldn't be surprising: Kuralt used to be on CBS on Sunday morning, and it turns out Osgood is the current anchor of CBS News Sunday Morning. (These are facts I might have already known if I were ever awake on Sunday morning.) Oh, and they're both named Charles, obviously. Anyway, Osgood was pretty good.

Anyway, if you want to order your own free copy of The Fed Today, you can check out the Federal Reserve Economic Education website. You could also get all the exact same information that's in that video at that website, but if you did that, you wouldn't cause the US government to needlessly shell out $2.10 in postage like Ruddy Ruddy did. So order the video. At worst, you can tape the new Britney Spears video on it, or whatever.

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