This course is designed to explain the importance of money and banking to economic activity. This course offers a systematic analysis of monetary theories and the financial system. Apart from exposing students to different approaches in monetary analysis, the course places a special emphasis on the up-to-date analysis of how information costs affect financial structure and monetary policy. The course will cover the structure and importance of the financial system, the functions of money, behavior of interest rates, financial structure and asymmetric information, bank management and regulation, debates on macroeconomic and monetary policies, the targets and instruments of monetary policies, the transmission mechanism of monetary policy and its effectiveness, money and inflation, rational expectations and its applications.