Financial Institutions and Markets

This course frames the financial system as a coherent machine: central banks set the short rate, that rate ripples through money, bond, FX, stock, and derivatives markets, and banks and other intermediaries sit in the middle bearing credit, liquidity, and interest-rate risk. You'll spend the term valuing securities from fundamentals, working through the term structure, and doing group projects that connect macro conditions to actual asset prices and bank balance sheets. It builds on intro macro and is the natural setup for later finance, monetary economics, and risk-management electives — essentially the bridge between what you learned about GDP and what actually moves on a trading screen.