The first two lectures paint a picture of the monetary system as the essential infrastructure of a decentralized market economy. The second lecture, "The Natural Hierarchy of Money", is a kind of high-level overview of the entire course, so don't expect to fully understand it until you look back after completing the rest of the course. Nevertheless it provides essential orientation for what comes after. Lectures notes for these and subsequent lectures may be found in the very first segment of this module.

The next two lectures are meant to introduce a key analytical tool, the balance sheet approach to monetary economics, that we will be using repeatedly throughout the course. As inspiration, first I provide a concrete example of how the approach works by "translating" the Allyn Young reading into the balance sheet language. I follow that with a more systematic introduction to this essential tool.

In the next four lectures, we build intuition by viewing banking as a payments system, in which every participant faces a daily settlement constraint (a survival constraint). From this point of view, the wholesale money market plays a key role by allowing banks to relax the discipline of a binding settlement constraint, delaying final payment by putting settlement off until a later date. The relative importance of the various money markets has changed since the 2008 crisis--Fed Funds is now less important--but the conceptual framework remains valid, indeed not only for dollar money markets but also for non-dollar money markets.

The next two lectures extend the payments system frame to non-banks by bringing in repo markets, and to the international monetary system by bringing in Eurodollar markets. Here, as in the previous two lectures, the emphasis is on settlement, and so implicitly on so-called "funding liquidity". The last three segments of the Eurodollar lecture, on the failure of two seemingly obvious arbitrage conditions, are meant to motivate the shift to market-making and "market liquidity" in the next module.