The Financial System, Financial Regulation and Central Bank Policy

Professor Thomas F. Cargill has taught and conducted research on financial and monetary economics at the University of California, Davis; University of Hawaii at both Honolulu and Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam; California State University, Sacramento; Purdue University, Indiana; and since 1973, the University of Nevada, Reno. He has written extensively as a single and joint author on US financial and central banking issues and has also conducted similar research on China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. His work has been published in the Journal of Economic History, Credit and Banking, the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Political Economy, Review of Economics and Statistics, and International Finance.

• 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.

'This text is truly an original approach to the topic. Cargill analyses the role of markets, regulation, and monetary policy to illuminate the financial system for students. His inclusion of Public Choice Theory is innovative. He unites the work of thinkers as diverse as John Taylor and Hyman Minsky to produce a coherent analysis of the modern financial system. I highly recommend it.' Gerald P. O'Driscoll, Jr, Cato Institute, Washington, DC, and former vice president at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, and Citigroup