[V3265] Economics of Money and Banking

This is a GREAT class. Prof. Andrews is a great professor who really cares about his students unlike some other professors I had this past semester.
He wants to know all of his students (and that is why he often "complained" about the class size) - he wanted to be able to hear everyone - which is certainly very tough to do when you have 100+ class (eventually it shrank, but still was not a seminar type class)

One thing that I found many students complained about was the non-clearenes of the assignments, but this was changed - only b/c professor Andrews really cared about our progress and asked the class what was wrong (the first midterm was not that great on average while 2nd midterm was much better).

Overall, professor Andrews is a caring professor. Sure, he has his own point of view (as we all do), but he never let that affect the judgment of the exams.

One thing that would definitely make the course more exciting is attendance of his OH. He is amazing at supporting conversation and helping out during the OH - that is when he has more time to get to know you and to really understand what is the missing part that makes you struggle.

Moreover, professor helped me with my other class by providing me with the list of readings and by talking to me about the topic. So he was a true professor for me not only for MB class but for my other course as well. My conclusion is that if you want this class to be amazing, it only depends on you. If you have the desire to learn, professor Andrews will provide you with all the necessary tools. He will contribute to your knowledge 100%.

Having said that, I STRONGLY recommend attending his OH.

Finally, I was shocked to hear that prof. Andrews was not given the tenure. It is said to see such a great professor to leave CU.

You may not be able to take good notes from what he writes on the board, but if you just listen to him and try and understand what is being said, you'll see how great of a lecturer he is. He also cares about his students so definitely go to his office hours and talk to him if you're feeling lost or have a question.

His tests are reasonable. The first may have been too technical and he realized that, so the second was purely short answer and very conceptual. The final was also very focused on basic concepts -- the course is all about basics, which he constantly repeats. He also stresses that he only cares about what you know at the end of the course, which means you can make up for poor past performance on the final.

It saddens me to hear that a professor like Marcellus is not getting tenure. Yes, this semester's class may have been a little hectic due to (1) the class being oversubscribed past the point he was comfortable and (2) him having personal issues, including being diagnosed with cancer again. He's not a perfect human, but he is always the first one to admit his flaws and apologize to for letting his personal life interfere with the class. He clearly cares a lot about his students and is very dedicated to running a high-quality course. That's more than you can say for the majority of professors.

The reviewer below seems to have forgotten that Andrews has been teaching this class in the middle of being diagnosed (for a second time) with cancer. A few weeks into the course, he was the victim of an attempted mugging at gun point. A week after that his home in NJ was out of power for a week and his young son had to be cared for because his school was closed. Yeah...try to have that NOT affect your performance as a lecturer.

Despite all that, he's being doing a FANTASTIC job. He saves a lot of the math for exercises, but he (really) only cares that you understand the subtle and complex links that underlie today's complex financial system, many of which were at the heart of the recent financial crisis. An understanding of those links, combined with an understanding of how they affect and are affected by risk, are really at the heart of this class. If you care about those issues, Andrews is a professor you will be interested in.

People seem to be a little intimidated by him...which I don't really understand. In fact, he seems to actually care quite a bit about his students. Admittedly, he tried to scare some of them away (which he acknowledged), but that seems to have worked. Next time, when he caps the course, that won't be an issue.

All in all, a great class.

DO NOT TAKE THIS CLASS!

He is the most disorganized professor at Columbia. He lets everything that is happening in his personal life affect his teaching. He forgot to cap his class to 80, and he had 160 students. A day before the first midterm he explained that he had been teaching madly so people drop the class.

His midterm was crazy, he had not explained half the stuff in it. His HW are intense complicated numerical problems, which are unrelated to the syllabus. He does not include these during lectures or exams. Hence, you are supposed to break your head and never use the concept again.

Though he is a good lecturer, it is not worth breaking your head on this class.

Professor Albanesi has her pros and cons. On one hand, the material is mostly reasoning rather than math, which makes it an easy class as an economics elective. That doesn't mean it isn't interesting, by the way, because I found that it usually is, especially the parts about regulation that other reviewers seem to dislike. That said, her presentation is a bit off-putting. In the first few classes she tried to use a digital pen that quickly proved useless, she can be somewhat... continuous in speaking, forgetting to take in some air, which is annoying. But overall, I think she tries hard to make this class pleasant, is always willing to explain, and is generally a nice person.

I think bringing in someone from the Fed for a lecture was a nice touch, and close to the end of the semester there was also a screening of "Inside Job."

Professor Mehrling is one of those professors who leaves you with a feeling of disappointment, because you feel they -could- have been great, but were admittedly sub par. The quality of his lectures fluctuated wildly. Sometimes, they were so dull that half the auditorium was falling asleep and/or just not coming (after a particularly long segment in the 1st half of the semester) but sometimes they were fascinating. I went to every lecture and can tell you that most of the first half of the semester will be painful and dull, then the second half will be much more interesting with only the occasional extra-boring lecture. If the professor reads this, I would recommend that he critically evaluates the visible class responses to some of his lectures and revamps them so that the quality is more consistent.

The workload is heavy. There aren't a lot of problem sets, but when you get to studying for the midterm, you'll be buried in paper. Mehrling's midterm is -very- late in the semester, so not only was the overwhelming majority of the lectures on the exam, but also nearly all the outside readings, and the majority of the Stigum reading. A decent midterm grade requires mastering well over a thousand pages of very tough material. There is just so much of it that I felt confused as to what was relevant for the exam and what was not. The Final was similar but had the add-on of an essay on one of two books and didn't have that much extra material.

Mehrling is trying to teach a "way of thinking." This is a very big goal and he doesn't really live up to it. Many people I spoke to felt that the class was a waste, and I can see why. We were so buried in material that we didn't really process anything and there was virtually no practical application to what we learned. This is not what students generally expect from a class called Money and Banking.

I wanted to write this review before I got the grade, because I feel that if it was good, I would feel compelled to give a more positive review and vice versa. The grading on the midterm was alright - one of the TAs was nitpicky, the other was lenient, so it balanced out to something normal. The class is gigantic, so Professor Mehrling made the TAs grade everything.

Overall, I would not recommend this class to anyone except a person with a very empty, light schedule. Don't be deceived by the first class - this course is not easy, not that consistently interesting, and bound to disappointed the majority. If none of this has deterred you, however, then good luck.

Professor Andrews is one of the greatest professors that I have had at this school. He is very intelligent and well-read, but really approachable, which is a rare thing here--especially in the econ department. He is uniquely honest and passionate about the subject. His frankness can be alarming, but he knows how to hold your attention. I had him for Economics of Money and Banking. Andrews really tried to communicate the information and to reach out to the class. For a room with 100 people, he made it seem almost like a seminar, taking questions and directly addressing students. He did a great job at making the material relevant and recommending outside reading and such. The textbook was good and he generally taught in accordance with it so I always knew where he was. However, Andrews is more interested in general theories and their practical application, so do not get to caught up in the specifics of the text like vocabulary terms. His class is challenging, but doable and he does his best to help. He always make things so interesting that students actually want to go to his lectures. He is one of a few professors who really tries to make students understand economics.

I quite enjoyed this class. Mehrling was so excited to have a real life economic crisis going on while he was teaching this class. He goes into really intricate detail sometimes, so the TA sessions help you grasp the big picture. If you put in the effort, this is not a complicated class. You don't even have to do all of the reading. Pay attention to what he likes to say in class and make sure you understand those things because they will be on the test. It is interesting material.

What can I possibly say about Perry Mehrling? He is the among the worst professors I've ever taken at Columbia, which might explain why he's been an associate professor for over 16 years. Don't get me wrong: Mehrling is REALLY nice and wants to teach his course in a way that's easy to understand and in touch with the current situation. That's great but as a lecturer, he is shockingly unclear, no one learned anything (students were asking about basic concepts and definitions during the midterm review, like what is an FRA,) and he talks down to his students like they don't know anything about economics. Mehrling's lectures are comprised of the following format: discuss an article from the FT, which he loves (ok, interesting,) bring up some sweeping statement about money and/or banking that's so general that it's completely inarguable and use the latter hour to utterly confuse the class with simplistic terminology, abstract concepts that are never explained, endless balance sheets, and stupid diagrams.
Mehrling wants to teach an entire class using only balance sheets and no numbers but this is ridiculous: how can you teach students about an FRA or CIP without showing the formulas to compute them? The only formula Perry ever brought up in class and on the homework was WRONG, in that it wasn't time-adjusted so all the answers would turn out to have negative interest. I had to go to a Catalan economics website to get the right one. That, essentially, sums up Perry as a teacher. The mean on the admittedly easy midterm was 60%. 60%! The only saving grace of the class was that the books assigned (Stigum's Money Market and a choice between a book on hedge funds and one on global finance) were fantastic. I'm much the better for reading them.

By all means STAY AWAY FROM HER. Money and Banking sounds very practical if you are interested in finance and such, but this instructor can totally destroy your hope of learning anything useful with her dry and dull presentations, and horrible accents. The class mainly focuses on the REGULATIONS in the money market history, and has almost nothing to do with banking. The fact that you don't need to hand in the problem sets may seem appealing at the beginning, but without solutions you actually can't learn anything. Then you look at the midterm and final, and can't even realize where you have learnt the stuff. She is also very rigid when she deals with students' questions and concerns.

The class was hard, but it was a very good class. I think a lot of people thought it would be an easy class, but most were very supprised to find out they had no idea what the midterm was asking after missing the whole first half of the semester.

Unlike some professors, Prof. Mehrling is interested in what takes place in the real world and could care less about academic theories that only work in the Economics Department. His class is very focused on real life money and banking.
Doing all the readings is a good idea, but you can figure out which ones you really need to read.

Prof. Mehrling's class was great. Highly conceptual and idea driven, no real number crunching, lots of writing. If you want a class where you're doing a lot of math, not a good one. If you want to understand how banking works in an innovative and updated way, go for this class. Probably the best Econ class I've taken. Mehrling is affable, easy-going, and his lecture notes are excellent.

I was very impressed with Professor Mehrling. His knowledge of the Fed and the monetary system is unbelievable; I never thought I would learn so much about these topics as I did from him. He did a good job of breaking down some very complicated material and made himself very available to answer student questions. The outside readings were sometimes annoying and could have been covered more in class but ultimately were helpful in understanding the course material. Recitations were not helpful or worth attending.