📄️ What a Bank Actually Does
Learn what a bank actually does. Discover how banks create money through loans, maturity transformation, and credit creation explained simply.
📄️ The bank balance sheet
Understand the bank balance sheet: assets, liabilities, and equity explained with real examples of how deposits and loans affect bank finances.
📄️ Fractional reserve banking
Fractional reserve banking explained: how banks keep only a fraction of deposits as reserves, lend the rest, and create the money multiplier effect.
📄️ How a loan creates a deposit
Learn how bank loans create deposits and expand the money supply. Understand the mechanics of credit creation and endogenous money.
📄️ The money multiplier
Money multiplier explained with detailed math: how a single dollar of reserves cascades into multiple dollars of deposits through fractional reserve banking.
📄️ Reserve requirements
Reserve requirements explained: how they work, their role in monetary policy, why the Fed eliminated them, and their continued global relevance.
📄️ Bank runs
Bank runs explained: why fractional reserve banking collapses when trust evaporates, historical examples, and modern protections like FDIC insurance.
📄️ Deposit insurance
Deposit insurance explained: FDIC coverage limits, how protection works, international schemes, and what's not covered when banks fail.
📄️ What a central bank is
Central bank explained: functions, independence, monetary policy tools, and how they differ from commercial banks. Federal Reserve, ECB, Bank of England.
📄️ The Federal Reserve
Federal Reserve explained: structure, dual mandate for price stability and employment, FOMC decision-making, and emergency powers.
📄️ The ECB
ECB explained: structure, monetary policy for 20 eurozone countries, single interest rate challenges, and quantitative easing programs.
📄️ The Bank of Japan
Bank of Japan explained: QE pioneer, yield curve control, Lost Decades, and lessons on monetary policy limits in deflationary economies.
📄️ The Bank of England
Bank of England explained: oldest central bank, dual mandate, QE pioneer, inflation fighting, and regulatory structure.
📄️ Open market operations
Open market operations explained: how the Fed buys/sells securities to influence the federal funds rate and control money supply.
📄️ Quantitative easing
Quantitative easing explained: how QE works, zero lower bound, Fed asset purchases, and effects on inflation and inequality.
📄️ Quantitative tightening
Quantitative tightening explained: how central banks reduce balance sheets, sell assets, drain reserves, and manage inflation risk without triggering recession.
📄️ The discount window
Discount window explained: Federal Reserve emergency lending facility, lender-of-last-resort function, penalty rates, collateral requirements, and crisis deployment.
📄️ Reserve currency status
Reserve currency explained: dollar dominance, Bretton Woods system, euro competition, yuan internationalization, and long-term currency outlook.
📄️ Modern Monetary Theory
Modern Monetary Theory explained: government spending constraints, inflation limits, Job Guarantee, and mainstream economic critique of MMT claims.
📄️ How banks fail
Bank failures explained: Lehman Brothers collapse, Washington Mutual failure, SVB 2023 bank run. Lessons from financial crises and regulatory failures.