I want to walk you through the syllabus a little bit, but usually at this point the question arises about prerequisites and math, yeah? Okay, the prerequisites for this course are intermediate macroeconomics and intermediate microeconomics. That's for the economics majors, okay? If you're an economics major, and you want to get major credit for this course, you have to have had those prerequisites beforehand, okay? We don't make much use of those, but let me just talk about, but we could and in other money and banking classes, they do. They start immediately from that. And at the end of the class, I will be connecting it up to the stuff that you know. So when I say intermediate macro, and intermediate micro, let me explain what I mean by that. Because usually some students here even from history, or from law, or something and they haven't taken these courses, and so they're worried, okay, about these prerequisites. When I say intermediate macro, I mean this. Okay. Intermediate macro. This is a story about the determination of national income and the determination of the rate of interest, a nominal rate of interest. And we're used to thinking about monetary policy as shifting around the LM curve and you could build a whole course around that, the foundations of the LM curve, that policy, the Taylor Rule, you might argue that this LM curve should be horizontal and that it's, you're trying to do inflation targeting maybe, or something. We'll talk about all of those things, okay? But we're not really going to be starting from here and building the foundations of the LM curve. In fact, we'll be questioning the whole concept of a stable money demand curve, or money supply curve. So it's actually at a much more fundamental level that we're operating. So this is intermediate macro and you will have seen that before. Intermediate micro is another diagram. This is economics, right? Consumption, this period, consumption, next period. And we have some kind of production possibility frontier that shows what the resources, how we can produce this, and produce that. And we have a tangent budget line here and the slope of that line is -1 / 1+R, the real interest rate in this case. And we think of there being different kinds of human beings in this world. Type one and type two, where they are maximizing their utility. Okay, there's a first order condition for you, right, and creating a tangency and choosing. We imagine they both start with the same wealth, they have the same production possibilities and then they trade. This person says they want to consume more in period one than they're producing in period one. And this person says, okay, they want to consume less in period one than they're producing in period one, and more in period two. So, this person is borrowing. And this person is lending. If we bring money into this story, okay, there is this notion that what are financial markets doing? They're allowing people to do inter-temporal trading in some way, between people who want to consume more today and people who want to consume more tomorrow. And there's an interest rate that clears that market. This is intermediate micro. This is general equilibrium. This is a story about the determination of the real rate of interest, okay? And sometimes this is called the Fisher diagram, after Irving Fisher. And you could build a whole money in banking class around this, and people do, okay? Thinking of banks, maybe there are some imperfection that keeps these people from meeting each other, asymmetric information or something like that. And banks or credit markets are sort of in between trying to facilitate this flow of savings to investment and so forth and the theory of intermediation. You could build a whole theory of money in banking around this. And there are textbooks that do that, okay? That's not what I'm doing in this class, okay? We will come back to both of these points of view, and connect up what we've learned to both of these points of view. But we're actually not starting from a set of economic apparatus, and thinking, how can we apply this to banking? No, we're starting at the other side. Let's start from that concrete realities of banking, and try to inductively draw from that some notion of how this thing works. What are its regularities? What kind of theoretical things can we say about it without imposing the structure right away? That's the strategy. So, what is the analytical apparatus that we use in this class? I've been teaching this class for a long time, let me just tell you that the first two weeks of this, you're going to experience as a little disorienting, okay? But then it will start to come together and everyone at the end feels fine, okay? So, it's just, and the reason it's disorienting is because you're used to grabbing onto that, okay, or grabbing onto that and say, yeah, I know where I am. I recognize this from the past course and there's not going to be stuff like that. You know, the very first stuff that you start reading is going to be things that are unfamiliar to you and so that's just the way it's going to be. I sometimes tell students it's really fortunate that many of you had an experience as a first year student or a second year student saying, here's Nietzsche, just read Nietzsche and we'll talk about it tomorrow or something. So you, students rely on that background that they know how to do that. That's okay, don't worry about it. It will eventually make sense to you. Read it, do your best and it will eventually come together. Just trust, it always does. And there is an intellectual tradition here with great care, great minds that are trying to figure this stuff out. And that's what we're trying to access. What I always do, when I'm reading the Financial Times, I say to myself, what would Bagehot make of all of this? Or what would Minsky make of all of this? Or what would Fisher Black make of all of this? These are people I've written biographies of, right? So I can enter their minds and say, what would they make of this, okay? That's how I think about the world always is by just shifting gears back and forth. That's what I bring to the table. So, I guess my answer is I'm a member of my own little school, but I don't feel alone at all. I don't feel alone at all because I have all these ancestors here, and they're pretty great guys, actually. Monetory economics is all about books, because it's so big, you can't really, you gotta write a treatise if you're really going to get anywhere in monetary economics. That's what I loved about it, that's why I chose monetary economics. I went down to the library, I saw that shelf of those books, and I said if I could have a life reading all of those books just from left to right that would be the best life ever and that's the life I've had.