米什金_货币金融学_第9版各章学习指导(4)

understand how our political system affects our economic system. Also students, like all of us, like reading about scandals, and this is why the Charles Keating story in the FYI box makes the principal-agent problem come alive.

The chapter ends with a discussion of where financial regulation might be heading in the aftermath of the subprime financial crisis. Instead of lecturing on this issue, I have the students themselves speculate on what measures may be needed to prevent a crisis like this from happening again. This gets them to apply the concepts in this chapter and makes for a very spirited discussion.

Note that Chapter 8 does not need to be covered in order to teach this chapter. However, if Chapter 8 is covered in class, Chapter 11 is a nice application of the analysis in that chapter. Indeed, the instructor might want to stress in class the counterparts in private financial markets to the methods financial regulators use to cope with adverse selection and moral hazard.

Part Two: Overviews of the Textbook Chapters and Teaching Tips 37

Chapter 12

Banking Industry: Structure and Competition

Chapter 12 supplements Chapter 2 by going into much greater detail about the structure of the banking system. This chapter differs from conventional chapters on the banking industry in other money and

banking textbooks by stressing a more dynamic, analytical framework than in other books. In particular it provides an analytic framework for understanding the process of financial innovation in which financial institutions respond to changes in the financial environment by searching for innovations that are likely to be profitable. This framework is then used to show how financial innovation and changes in the ability to process information have led to a decline in the traditional banking business and to fundamental changes in the structure of the banking industry.

38 Mishkin The Economics of Money, Banking, and Financial Markets, Ninth Edition

Chapter 13

Central Banks and the Federal Reserve System

Chapters 13–16 explore in detail how monetary policy is conducted. Although most professors covering monetary theory will want to include much of this material in their courses, later chapters on monetary theory do not directly depend on Chapters 13–16, so they can be skipped without loss of continuity. Other professors covering monetary theory may prefer to teach this material after they have taught the chapters on monetary theory.

The chapter starts by laying out modern theories of central banking: It first discusses the price stability goal and the role of a nominal anchor in solving the time-inconsistency problem, and then discusses the other goals of monetary policy and why price stability is now viewed as the primary goal of monetary policy.

The time-inconsistency problem is one of the most important ideas in monetary theory in the last twenty years. I illustrate the time-inconsistency problem by using the example of how many people cannot stick to a diet even though they know this is the right thing for them to do in the long run. Many other examples can bring this idea home to the student. Another good example is the fact that it is optimal not to give in to children when they are behaving badly, but parents still have a tendency to renege on this optimal plan.

A third example is that governments usually provide funds to rebuild in coastal areas after a hurricane, even though it is not optimal to build in areas that are likely to be ravaged by hurricanes. You might ask the students to think of other examples in order to hammer home this important idea.

The chapter then discusses how the central bank in the United States—the Federal Reserve System—

operates. The basic point that should be driven home in class is that although the Federal Reserve System has a complicated bureaucratic structure, in practice, it functions like a single central bank, headquartered in Washington, D.C. Students should enjoy the discussion of how foreign central banks are structured and how foreign central banks are similar to or differ from the central bank in the United States.

To help the instructor spice up the discussion of the Federal Reserve, I try to provide an inside view of the Fed by including material on such topics as the political genius of the way the Federal Reserve was set up to preserve its independence, the special role of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the research staff in the Federal Reserve System, the role of member banks, how a typical FOMC meeting is conducted, how Ben Bernanke’s style differs from that of the former Chairman of the Fed, Alan Greenspan, and how the foreign exchange and open market desks at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York operate. To feature this new material I have included some of it in a set of special interest boxes, titled “Inside the Fed,” which provide insights on how the Federal Reserve System operates although they are based on information that is entirely in the public domain.

Until recently, the Federal Reserve had no significant rivals in the central banking world. This changed in January 1999 with the startup of the European Central Bank (ECB), which now conducts monetary policy for countries that are members of the European Monetary Union, which in total have a population that

exceeds that of the United States and a GDP comparable to that of the U.S. Because of growing interest by students in the workings of the European Central Bank, the chapter has an extensive discussion of the structure and independence of the European Central Bank. To motivate this material, I focus on how the ECB is similar to the Federal Reserve and how it differs. The chapter also contains brief descriptions of the structure and independence of three other important central banks of interest to students: the Bank of Canada, the Bank of En …… 此处隐藏：6172字，全部文档内容请下载后查看。喜欢就下载吧 ……