Yes, exchange rates can also be talked about.
The floating of exchange rates is also a product of change within the global environment, and it has the ability to effect financial management in terms of managing business costs and revenue. Whilst it is technically part of strategies, you would then go on to explain how financial management has responded to this - Natural Hedging (Establishing offshore subsidiaries & Denominating trade in a single currency) and/or Financial Derivatives Hedging (Futures, Options, Swaps) If you wanted to push yourself to the upper band 6 range, you could have started talking about the sustained depreciation of the AUD and/or the currency crisis experienced in emerging economies, and this has effected financial management for businesses. If you had extra time you could have also talked about how this is an increasingly dominant influence because of globalisation and the emergence of global supply chains and trade.
2. Availability of funds was pretty straightforward as well, and you can just talk about the deregulation of financial systems as well as the payments revolution.
3. Interest rates was the meat of my essay and something that could easily push you to the upper band 6 range - Not only could you talk about the low interest rate environment, but also how the role of financial management has shifted Eg. Increasing focus on corporate buybacks following rising boardroom pressure, tightened corporate governance, and the recent rise in protectionist policies from Trump's Tariffs (Increased protection --> Reduced competition --> Businesses become complacent and instead of re-investing funds back into R&D/Employee Training, it decides to prop up its stock price). If you wanted to be extra spicy you can also extend it back to how it effects the global economic outlook [Increase in corporate buybacks --> Fuels the rise in stock prices (as seen in the 10year bull market with major indexes at all time highs) --> marginally positive effect on consumer confidence and consumption --> improved global economic outlook].
I thought the economics exam wasn't until next Wednesday?
Last edited by HoldingOn; 3 Nov 2018 at 1:12 PM.
does anyone have a copy of the paper?
Everything for the paper was very easy.
Bar the Section 4 questions which were more on the challenging side.
I dodged the finance question which was a bit of a mistake because after the paper I realised it was an economics essay. Instead I did the price/quality interaction essay which I felt I had a fair crack at. 3 marketing paragraphs and 2 operations paragraphs because my gut instinct said it was a marketing/operations hybrid. Each of the strategies had to be linked to price/quality interaction, so I approached the angle that globalisation has influenced businesses to adopt strategy XYZ and this has impacted on their price/quality interaction in this way.
(5) Supply chain management - wrote about McDonalds as a case study, using global sourcing to find inputs that match the strategic role of their operations, leading to lower prices at the expense of quality.