The goal of this class is to give you the tools to understand the macroeconomy. By the end of the course, you should come away with an appreciation of the role and significance of various financial and monetary institutions for the functioning of a modern industrial economy, and of the complexity of the problems they solve. You should be able to evaluate the likely effects of various macroeconomic policies, and perhaps more importantly, to evaluate when policy is or is not an appropriate tool.
The class is divided into three roughly equal units: