Money & banking
Undergraduate · Economics
Syllabus focus
Topics typically covered
Standard syllabus
Financial system
- Roles of money, credit, and financial intermediaries
- Interest rates: nominal/real, term structure (intro)
- Bond pricing and yield basics
- Stock markets and efficient-market ideas (survey)
- Asymmetric information in lending
- Financial crises stylized timeline
Banking
- Bank balance sheets and liquidity/solvency
- Reserve requirements and deposit creation
- Credit risk, interest-rate risk, and duration intro
- Regulation and deposit insurance
- Shadow banking survey
- Fintech and payment systems overview
Central banking and policy
- Federal Reserve structure and tools (or local central bank)
- Open-market operations and interest-on-reserves
- Monetary policy goals and dual mandate
- Transmission channels to the real economy
- Inflation targeting and forward guidance (intro)
- International reserves and FX intervention survey
STEM / applied
Quantitative practice
- Calculate simple bond prices/yields
- Analyze T-account impacts of Fed operations
- Spreadsheet term-structure examples
- Interpret yield-curve shapes
- Read FOMC statements with vocabulary precision
- Problem sets on money multipliers (as taught)
Applications
- Case studies: 2008, COVID policy, regional banking stress
- Compare central-bank frameworks across countries
- Communicate financial-stability tradeoffs
- Connect banking to macro IS–LM/MP models
- Ethics of lending and inclusion
- Capstone: bank/regulator role-play briefing
Notes
May sit in economics or finance departments. Tutoring aligns to the course’s institutional focus (US Fed vs comparative).