The answers for the Bank Underground Christmas Quiz are:
Q1: Santa Claus lives at the North pole. What currency does his nearest cash machine dispense?
Answer: c) Norwegian Krona – The world’s most northerly cash machine is on Spitsbergen, which is part of Norway.
Q2: Which classical economist’s ideas are approvingly mentioned by Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol”
Answer: a) Thomas Malthus – Malthus idea of “surplus population” are cited by Mr Scrooge. See this wonderful article at Forbes for more.
Q3: What is the main goods export of Christmas Island?
Answer: a) Phosphate – According to the CIA’s world factbook the main goods activity on the island is the mining of low grade phosphate.
Q4: Which snowy central bank is this?
Answer: d) Bank of Finland – Thanks to our friends at the Bank of Finland for supplying us with this photo.
Q5: Which Nobel prize winning American economist was born on Boxing Day?
Answer: a) Edward Prescott – There was a slight clue in the wording of the question, as Ed Prescott is the only American of the four listed. The others are Norwegian, Canadian and British respectively.
Q6: In the Bible, Jesus suggests that interest rates were above the zero lower bound in first century Judea. In his ‘Parable of the talents’, one protagonist exclaims “Well then, you should have put my money on deposit with the bankers, so that when I returned I would have received it back with interest.”. In which gospel does this appear?
Answer: a) Matthew – The quote is from Matthew 25 verse 27.
Q7: A pivotal moment in the South Sea Bubble was the announcement that the company was going to defer its Christmas dividend for 12 months. Which year’s deferral was the harbinger of doom for the troubled company?
Answer: a) 1719 – The South Sea bubble burst in 1720, heralded by the deferred Christmas dividend the year before.
Q8: In 19th century, images of Santa Claus could be found on the banknotes of which country?
Answer: d) United States of America – Several private US banks with the right to issue currency use Santa Claus on their own notes. See this post at Liberty Street Economics for more.
Q9: In Davis and Wohlgenant’s seminal 1993 American Journal of Agricultural Economics paper on Christmas tree pricing, what was the estimated price elasticity of demand for Christmas trees?
Answer: c) 0.7 – The estimated elasticity is (minus) 0.674, or 0.7 to one decimal place. See the paper itself for more.
Q10: One might expect the January sales to show up in the aggregate price statistics. On average what is the month on month change in consumer prices index between December and January since 1989?
Answer: d) -0.4% – Trust us. We’ve done the math on this one…