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Banks: How do they work? What role do they play in the economy?
Central Banks: What are they? How do they affect interest rates and
influence the economy? How should they act?
Financial Markets: How do bond and stock markets behave and how
do they affect the economy?
The material in this class will relate to lots of topical issues, such as
the role of the ECB in the euro area crisis and the choices facing other
leading central banks, in particular the Federal Reserve.
What money is, how banks operate and why they are important, what
central banks are and how they create money, the relationship between
money and inflation, how central banks control short-term interest rates.
Inflation and the Phillips curve; central bank institutions; goals and
strategies; rules for setting interest rates.
How to prepare
In some cases, the lecture notes will have more detail than I will
have to time to cover in class, so sometimes I will just summarize
them and you can study the additional detail at home.
I will provide useful data sources and also good websites featuring
journalists and economists discussing the latest issues related to
central banking, banking regulation, financial markets and
macroeconomics.
Assessment
40% for a one-hour multiple choice that will take place in seminars.
40% an essay that you will choose from a list provided, or that you
could suggest on the basis of classes
20% for final exam. This will have two equally-weighted sections:
Section A: The first section will feature a choice of different short
Computers: The vast majority of you dont need to have a computer open
in class. If you absolutely must use a computer, you should sit at the very
back of the lecture hall. Otherwise, keep them closed.
Yap: If you want to chat with your mates, theres lots of space outside the
lecture hall. Low-level mumbling can be heard by me and other students
and is irritating to all. I will ask you to stop or leave.
1. Money as a Medium of
Exchange
We are all so used to accept coins and pieces of paper to acquire goods and
services that it is hard to imagine a world without it.
However, money did not always exist. In the past, many societies relied on
barter to exchange goods and services.
As you can imagine, barter had its downsides. The next few pages provide
some quotes from William Stanley Jevonss famous book Money and the
Mechanism of Exchange including some anecdotes from his discussions
with European tourists visiting Pacific Islands that still practiced barter.
In exchange for an air from Norma and a few other songs, she was
to receive a third part of the receipts. When counted, her share was
found to consist of three pigs, twenty-three turkeys, forty-four
chickens, five thousand cocoa-nuts, besides considerable quantities
of bananas, lemons, and oranges ...
At the Halle in Paris, this amount of live stock and vegetables might
have brought four thousand francs, which would have been good
remuneration for five songs.
Examples of Mediums of
Exchange: The Island of Yap
Also interesting was that it was not necessary for owners to physically possess the
stones. After concluding bargains that involved too many stones to be conveniently
moved, its new owners were quite content to accept the bare acknowledgment of
ownership and without so much as a mark to indicate the exchange, the coin remains
undisturbed on the former owners premises.
While large stones and cigarettes make entertaining examples of items that
can be used as a medium of exchange, coins made of precious metals such
as gold and silver have been the dominant format for money for most of its
history.
3. The metals generally had their own separate value for use as jewelry or ornaments,
so the coins could still have a value even if they ceased to be accepted purely as a
medium of exchange.
4. The fact that metals were difficult to extract meant that the supply of such
metals was usually stable.
In practice, most of the monetary systems that have existed have been
controlled by governments as opposed to emerging spontaneously from private
markets.
Charles Goodharts 1998 paper Two Concepts of Money, he explains the key
roles governments have played in introducing money, in enforcing its use as
legal tender and in generating demand for it via requiring payment of taxes in
money.
As you might expect, the business of creating money has always been a
profitable one.
For example, obtaining a bunch of tokens with relatively low (possibly zero)
intrinsic value and then being able to use them to purchase goods and
services is a very nice trick to pull off if you can manage it.
Governments through the ages have always struggled with how best to
finance their operations and the revenue from coinage (known as
seigniorage) was an attractive form of financing.
Governments that wanted to keep this revenue for themselves could ban
private money and write laws that make their own money the legal tender of
the land.
These laws usually require the currency to be accepted as a way of settling
debts.
A common pattern in pre-modern times was that governments would finance
the expenditures associated with wars by producing large amounts of new
coins, thus significantly increasing the supply of money.
As we will discuss later, increases in the supply of money tend to produce
inflation. For this reason, wars were generally associated with high inflation
in pre-modern Europe.
The introduction of currency also made it much more convenient for governments to
collect taxation.
Kings traditionally required resources to fund their armies, justice systems, palaces
and so on.
Prior to the existence of currency, kings could request, for example, 10 percent of
everyones output and then use barter to exchange stuff they didnt need for stuff they
did need.
But this kind of system creates lots of complications. At what point in the year does
the king collect his share and where does he store it all? How would the king collect
ten percent of the output of a barber or a playwright?
Requiring that taxation be paid in the legal tender created an important source of
demand for the currency and also restricted its supply: A government running a
balanced budget would receive as much currency as it created so it was not
increasing the total supply of currency.