Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-4rdrl Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-05T14:42:59.001Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Panel Discussion on the Teaching of Money and Banking

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 October 2009

Extract

To discuss what's right and wrong with the teaching of contemporary money-andbanking courses, we must first distinguish the various species of courses that fall under the M&B genus. In economics departments, the undergraduate M&B course is conceived prototypically in either of two ways: (1) as a basic macroeconomics course, including in principle (though often not in practice) an introductory swipe at international finance, or (2) as a policy course focusing on the art of central banking, including an obligatory introduction to opportunities for intervention in foreign-exchange markets. For convenience, let's call these alternative course conceptions (M&B)1 and (M&B)2, respectively. In business-school finance departments, M&B courses seek primarily to explain how contemporary financial markets and institutions work. These courses develop analytical descriptions of different types of financial transactions, instruments, transactors (with special emphasis on the roles played by intermediaries, dealers, and brokers), and contract terms (with special focus on implicit and explicit yields). Whereas MBA-level offerings are of negligible importance to the typical economics department, they represent a sizeable portion of the finance-department M&B market. Undergraduate M&B courses in finance departments–(M&B)3–differ from MBA-level ones–(M&B)–in assuming that students possess little background or interest in macroeconomic theory per se. (M&B)4 courses shape up as a linear combination of (M&B)3 and either or both (M&B)1 and (M&B)2.

Type
IX. Teaching of the Basic Money and Financial Institutions Course
Copyright
Copyright © School of Business Administration, University of Washington 1976

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Given U.S. graduate schools' preoccupation with the Federal Reserve System, this tendency helps to explain why courses in comparative central banking have been slow to develop.

2 I say “only partly” because seeing certain misconceptions on paper is devastating to teacher and student alike. I know a high-school Economics teacher who is haunted by an answer he received on an examination last fall. In answer to the classic question of how market prices are determined, one of his students explained mindlessly that they were determined by two persons: Sue Ply and Ann DeMann.

3 It seems that only by playing fast and loose with the zerox machine and the copyright laws can any of us manufacture a truly adequate M&B course.