CNN news 2011-09-30
CARL AZUZ, CNN ANCHOR: It`s Friday. I`m Carl Azuz, and you`re watching CNN Student News.
The economy leads off today`s headlines.
Some financial experts think the U.S. economy isn`t growing fast enough, that it`s not growing very fast at all, and that news is not going over well with investors. The stock market is one thing people look at to see how the economy is doing.
And the Dow Jones Industrial Average, a collection of 30 major stocks, is used to determine how the whole market is doing. The answer yesterday: not good. The Dow dropped nearly 400 points. At one point during the day, it was down more than 500 points.
One thing that seemed to spook investors and trigger this drop was action taken by the Federal Reserve, and you hear a lot about the Fed. Who are they? What do they do? cnnmoney.com`s Paul LaMonica is here with some answers.
PAUL LAMONICA, CNNMONEY.COM: Thanks, Carl. The Federal Reserve is the nation`s central bank, and its main job is to try and keep the economy afloat by doing two essential things.
One, it tries to make sure that inflation doesn`t get out of control so that you don`t have to be paying a lot more for things like gas and food. And then what it`s also trying to do is make sure that there are the most amount of people working as possible. It wants to try and keep unemployment low.
And how the Federal Reserve does this is it manages interest rates. It has a key interest rate that it can raise or lower that is very important because it helps dictate how much consumers pay for things like student loans, mortgages and credit cards.
The problem the Fed has had in the past few years is that it`s lowered this key rate to zero, pretty much zero in December of 2008, because of the financial crisis a few years ago. So it`s had to try a bunch of other kind of quirky, creative things to get rates even lower than where they are now.
And a lot of people think that the Fed, really, is just grasping at straws, they don`t have much left that they can actually do to help the economy, because rates were already low. It`s not as if people are complaining about high rates on their mortgages or student loans.
They can`t get that much lower, and a lot of people in the financial markets think that the Fed just can`t really do much to help the job market at this point.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Just the facts: capital punishment means to be put to death for a crime. It`s also known as the death penalty. Capital punishment has been carried our for centuries, and in U.S. prisons since the 1800s. The U.S. Supreme Court suspended the death penalty in 1972, and reinstated it four years later. Today, capital punishment is legal in 34 U.S. states.