[MUSIC] Hello, welcome to the course, understanding the Australian economy, an introduction to microeconomic and financial policies. I am Denny Lie, and I will be your guide for the next few weeks of this course. I'm a lecturer at the School of Economics here at the University of Sydney where I teach in both the undergraduate and postgraduate programs. Prior to this, I was a Research Associate at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, part of the United States Federal Reserve System. In both my teaching and research, my interest lies particularly in the topic of microeconomic policies. It is therefore my pleasure to guide you through this enriching journey regarding Australia's economy, and more specifically our nation's microeconomic and financial policies. In this course, we will discuss some of the key issues and dilemmas facing the Australian economy and how policymakers deal with them. And to compliment and inform our discussion, we will also utilise a contemporary economic framework and draw up on recent actual economic data. Although this course will mostly focus on the Australian economy, many of the discussions here can also help you understand various issues in microeconomic and financial policies in other countries. Now the course is organised into four modules, each designed to be covering around one week. The first module will give you and over view of the Australian economy, which will serve as a useful platform for the rest of the modules and inform our discussions. In the second module, we will discuss monetary policy and its role in stabilising and influencing the economy. We will then explore fiscal policy and its key issues in the third module. These two policies, monetary and fiscal, are the main microeconomic policy tools used by policymakers not just in Australia, but also in other countries or economies. And finally in the fourth module, we will discuss the 2007 global financial crisis, a crisis so deep and global that its impact and consequences are still being talked about even now. We will discuss how policymakers have responded to the crisis and how that shaped current microeconomic and financial policies. Within each module, there will be lectures and links to recommended resources and readings. There will also be quizzes to assess all the knowledge you learn each week. I also encourage you to participate in the weekly discussion topics, as this will help you learn and interact with other learners from across the globe. By the end of this course, I hope that you will have gained a better understanding and appreciation of our nation's economy. There's so much to learn. No matter whether you have an economics or finance background or a new to the field of economics altogether, I'm positive that you will walk away from this course learning something new. So join me for the next four weeks of this course. See you online. [MUSIC]