Includes bibliographical references and index.

Machine generated contents note: Part I. Introduction to the Financial and Monetary Regime: 1. The financial and monetary regime; 2. Basic concepts regarding money; Part II. The Financial System Component of the Financial and Monetary Regime: 3. The financial system and the country's flow of funds; 4. Interest rates in the financial system; 5. The level of interest rates; 6. The structure of interest rates; 7. International dimensions of the financial system; Part III. The Role of Government in the Financial and Monetary Regime: 8. The basic roles of government in the financial and monetary regime; 9. Regulation and supervision of the financial system; 10. A short history of the US financial and monetary regime in action; Part IV. Five Steps to Understanding Central Banks and Central Bank Policy: 11. The five steps and step 1 - the institutional design of the central bank; 12. Central banks, base money and the money supply; 13. Step 2 - tools of monetary policy and step 3 - monetary policy instruments; 14. Step 4 - the central bank model of the economy; 15. Step 5 - final policy targets; 16. Monetary policy tactics, strategy and rules versus discretion; Part V. Performance of the US financial and monetary regime: 17. Four important periods in the US financial and monetary regime.

"Traditional money and banking textbooks are long, expensive, and full of so much institutional and technical modeling detail that students cannot understand the big picture. Thomas F. Cargill presents a new alternative: a short, inexpensive book without the 'bells and whistles' that teaches students the fundamentals in a clear, narrative form. In an engaging writing style, Cargill explains the three core components of money and banking, and their interactions: 1) the financial system, 2) government regulation and supervision, and 3) central bank policy. Cargill focuses on the interaction between government financial policy and central bank policy and offers a critique of the central bank's role in the economy, the tools it uses, how these tools affect the economy, and how effective these policies have been, providing a more balanced perspective of government policy failure versus market failure than traditional textbooks"--

"Traditional money and banking textbooks are long, expensive, and full of so much institutional and technical modeling detail that students can't understand the big picture. Tom Cargill presents a new alternative: a short, inexpensive book without the "bells and whistles" that teaches students the fundamentals in a clear, narrative form. In an engaging writing style, Cargill explains the three core components of money and banking, and their interactions: 1) the financial system, 2) government regulation and supervision, and 3) central bank policy. Cargill focuses on the interaction between government financial policy and central bank policy and offers a critique of the central bank's role in the economy, the tools it uses, how these tools affect the economy, and how effective these policies have been, providing a more balanced perspective of government policy failure versus market failure than traditional textbooks"--