Panel Discussion on the Teaching of Money and Banking

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.