Week 11 — Readings & Resources

Course: Principles of Macroeconomics (ECON 2) · Silver Oak University (fictional sample) · Prof. Ashford
Focus: Monetary Policy, Interest Rates & Aggregate Demand — the Transmission Mechanism · Objective 7

Everything below is a link to a free external resource — nothing is embedded, copied, or downloaded. Links were verified live at build time; if one ever rots, the per-term update re-checks them. (Canvas: a Page of links + ExternalUrl module items.)

📖 Read (≈25 min)

1. OpenStax, Principles of Macroeconomics 3e — Ch. 15, "Introduction to Monetary Policy and Bank Regulation" (covers 15.3 How a Central Bank Executes Monetary Policy; 15.4 Monetary Policy and Economic Outcomes)
   🔗 https://openstax.org/books/principles-macroeconomics-3e/pages/15-introduction-to-monetary-policy-and-bank-regulation
   The transmission mechanism from the policy rate → interest rates → investment/consumption → aggregate demand — the spine of this week's chain.

2. Marginal Revolution University — "Monetary Policy: The Best Case Scenario"
   🔗 https://mru.org/courses/principles-economics-macroeconomics/federal-reserve-monetary-policy-changes
   Walks through how a Fed rate change is expected to move output via the AD channel — a second, independent walk-through of the same chain you built in lecture.

▶️ Watch (≈10 min)

3. CrashCourse Economics #10 — "What's all the Yellen About? Monetary Policy and the Federal Reserve" (Adriene Hill & Jacob Clifford)
   🔗 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dq7mMort9o
   Revisits the interest-rate transmission mechanism — the same video that anchored Week 10, directly applicable here as it continues into how rate changes move the wider economy.

🛠️ Tools & data for this week (links only)

4. Desmos Graphing Calculator — build your Workshop 11 chain table here.
   🔗 https://www.desmos.com/calculator
   Free, no account needed.

5. FRED — Federal Funds Effective Rate (FEDFUNDS), Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis
   🔗 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FEDFUNDS
   The real-world policy-adjacent interest-rate series — see how the actual federal funds rate has moved over time, the real-data counterpart to this week's engineered 6%→5% example.

Why these earn the click: OpenStax Ch. 15 and the MRU piece each walk the SAME transmission chain from a different angle, reinforcing the link-by-link habit from lecture; the CrashCourse video keeps the Fed's toolkit and its effects in view and motion; FRED lets you see the real federal funds rate that our engineered 6%/5%/7% numbers are modeling.