The chapters
Six chapters covering money and its prices, and money in the wider economy. Chapters 2, 3, 4 and 6 are complete; 1 and 5 are outlined and being written.
Introduction
What the field is about, why a dollar today is not a dollar tomorrow, and how the pieces of the financial system fit together.
Money, Money Supply, and Interest
What money is, how much of it exists, how the official measures are built, and what it costs to borrow it.
Bonds and Loanable Funds
Pricing a bond as a present value, why price and yield are one fact, and the two markets that set the interest rate.
Interest Rates in More Detail
Why rates differ across maturity, risk and tax treatment: the risk structure and the term structure, with a movable yield curve.
Financial Markets through Time
How markets for money and credit developed, and what the long historical record shows.
Aggregate Supply and Aggregate Demand
The framework connecting money to output, employment and prices, with a movable AD-AS diagram and the spending multiplier.
How each chapter is built
The idea, in plain words
Short, self-contained explanations written for a reader meeting the concept for the first time. No prior economics assumed beyond arithmetic.
A chart of the real thing
Every concept is immediately shown in the actual series that measures it, drawn from the current official release rather than a stored snapshot.
Do it yourself
A numbered Excel walkthrough for each figure: where to download the series, which formula computes the transformation, and how to read the result.
Where the numbers come from
Everything on this site traces back to an official statistical release. The charts reach public services that allow direct browser requests and need no account or key.
- Federal Reserve H.6, Money Stock Measures : M1, M2, currency in circulation and their components, monthly since 1959.
- Federal Reserve H.15, Selected Interest Rates : the federal funds rate, Treasury constant-maturity yields and the bank prime rate.
- Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Price Index : CPI for all urban consumers, used for inflation and for converting nominal rates to real ones.
- Bureau of Economic Analysis, National Income and Product Accounts : nominal and real GDP.
- U.S. Treasury, Fiscal Data : federal debt held by the public, daily since 1997.
FRED is the natural place to get all of these, and every chart here links to its FRED page so you can download the series in one click. FRED's programming interface cannot be called from inside a web page, though: it requires an account key and its servers do not permit cross-site browser requests. The charts therefore fetch the same official series through DBnomics, a free public mirror of the Fed, BLS and BEA releases, and through the BLS public API. The FRED links are for you; the mirror is for the page.
About
This is an independent teaching resource. The explanations, charts and exercises are original and written for this site. Chapter and section headings follow the standard organisation of an undergraduate money-and-banking course so the material can be read alongside whichever textbook a course uses; no textbook text is reproduced here.
Written and maintained by Sanket Kanekar. Corrections and suggestions are welcome through the repository's issues page.