宏观经济学原理与应用（第二版）教学配套课件罗伯特.E.霍尔banking_system.pdfVIP

The Banking System and the Money Supply Slides by: John Pamela Hall ECONOMICS: Principles and Applications 3e HALL LIEBERMAN © 2005 Thomson Business and Professional Publishing What Counts as Money • Money has several useful functions – Provides a unit of account • Standardized way of measuring value of things that are traded – Serves as store of value • One of several ways in which households can hold their wealth • Yet credit cards are not considered money, even though you can use them to buy things • Why is this? – A more formal definition of money helps to answer questions like this • Money is an asset that is widely accepted as a means of payment – Only assets—things of value that people own—can be considered as money » This is why credit limit on your credit card, or your ability to go into a bank and borrow funds, is not considered money – Only things that are widely acceptable as a means of payment are regarded as money » Other assets—such as stocks and bonds or even gold bars—cannot generally be used to pay for goods and services » They fail the acceptability test 2 Measuring the Money Supply • Amount of money in circulation can affect macroeconomy • Money Supply – Total amount of money held by the public • In practice, measuring money supply is not as straightforward as it might seem • Governments have decided best way to deal with them is to have different measures of the money supply – In effect, alternative ways of defining what is and what is not money – Each measure includes a selection of assets tha