central-banking

The instruments a modern central bank uses to influence the economy — policy rate, open-market operations, reserve requirements, lender-of-last-resort facilities, quantitative easing, and forward guidance — and the transmission channels through which each affects inflation and employment.

How inflation is measured (CPI, PCE, GDP deflator), the demand-pull and cost-push mechanisms, why the modern Phillips curve depends on inflation expectations, and the structural reason 'anchored' expectations matter so much to outcomes.

The functional definition of money, the distinction between base money and broad money, how the banking system creates the latter from the former, and why the quantity equation (MV = PQ) relates money to prices only through variables that themselves move.