High Finance...

I'm thinking that today is Finance day here in Dijon. We had morning lecture on a bit of global economics, and then we broke for lunch. Lunch was interesting... Lots of pointing and motioning and suddenly some food appears. Oh well, at least I'm not trying to speak spanish to folks any more. There are still a bunch of scared looking applicants running around school. Some of the french students tried to get me to play a little ping pong this afternoon, but I had to pass. Apparently my reputation for poor ping pong skills hasn't preceded me this far across "the pond" (I'm starting to sound like a serious world traveller).

We spent this afternoon in finance class working on some problems and such. We're getting ready for our finance mid term tomorrow, so everyone is a little wound up. However, I think things are going to be fine. The test is open note, open book, and you can use excel, so we're studying and building excel models tonight. The nice thing is, we have seen a lot of these concepts in our Financial Management class before.

In keeping with today's finance theme, we had an afternoon tour at the Banque de France. The folks at the bank were extremely nice and they gave us a great presentation. Apparently Banque de France is responsible for a lot of France's monetary policy. They handle all of the transactions for the French government. They also do a lot of research and data gathering through surveys and other polls. Banque de France is also very active in analyzing the credit worthiness of individuals and businesses. They take action against people and organizations in bankruptcy as well as maintain credit reports on entities. The bank also works closely with the European Central Bank to set interest rates. I suppose you could call them a combination of a consumer/commercial bank, the equivalent of our Federal Bank, and the equivalent of a credit analysis company like Experian. It was also interesting to see how similar their system is to ours. They have a credit rating system, they proceed through the steps of bankruptcy like we do, they control money like we do. However, there are some differences... the exchanges between different types of currency and different countries is incredible. Imagine if all 50 states had different currencies (with different exchange rates), and then one day, everyone decided to go to the dollar. Well, they did that here with the introduction of the euro just 7 years ago. Amazing! Talk about jumping through hoops.

I'm sorry there are no pictures today. I figured you all wouldn't be too interested in seeing the inside of our classroom, nor the inside of a conference room (of course they took us out to their private garden after the presentation, which was beautiful, and I didn't have my camera) at a bank.

Tomorrow's docket covers class, the finance mid term, and then a tour of local wineries. I'm looking forward to tasting some french wine, so I can see how much better Paso wine is! I'll get some good pictures of wineries and vineyards (that way you can critique their pruning methods, Jeff).

Hope everyone is well. Miss everyone!