Market participants, including financial institutions, fund managers and corporations, must understand monetary policy setting impacts on economic activity and the business cycle. A central bank will typically implement monetary policy settings in order to achieve certain economic outcomes over a business cycle. Choose two countries from the list below, describe the intermediate target for monetary policy, and explain the implementation process of the monetary policy in the two countries you selected. Give examples of different economic indicators that may give an insight into the future stages of a business cycle.

the United States

Australia

Singapore

China

Russia

New Zealand

4. Consider a system of N distinguishable and non-interacting particles, which may be found in two states of energy, with E = 0 and E => 0. Given the total energy of the system, Etot obtain an expression for the associated number of microscopic states. This is the same as the previous problem but we will now use the partition function to calculate its physical properties. Using the partition function that you derived in HW #2 answer the following: a. Find an expression for the free energy as a function of T of this system. b. From the free energy, find expressions for the energy and entropy of the system.