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Most money is not printed by a government. It is created by commercial banks when they lend, and by central banks when they buy assets. Everything else follows from that, and this is the shortest honest path to understanding it.
The demo gives you a $10B central bank purchase and asks you to post the entries on both balance sheets. Ten minutes here makes every article about the Fed readable.
Open the demoReserves, repo, the monetary base, quantitative easing. Each glossary entry explains what moves on whose balance sheet, names the usual misconception, and links the primary source.
Read the glossaryFrom what makes an unbacked token acceptable, through commercial banking and the Fed and ECB levers, to how a dollar crisis is contained. Each track builds the mechanism the next one needs.
See the syllabusStart with one question — where does money come from? — and answer it properly before moving on. Most money is not printed by a government; it is created by commercial banks when they make loans, and the rest is created by central banks buying assets. OpenMacro's first track covers exactly this, free and without an account, and its playable demo has you post a real central bank operation yourself rather than read about it.
No. The core of monetary economics is double-entry bookkeeping — every piece of money is somebody's asset and somebody else's liability — and that requires addition, not calculus. OpenMacro teaches through balance sheets you fill in by hand, so the arithmetic never gets harder than adding two numbers and checking they match.
Personal finance is about your money: budgeting, saving, paying down debt. Macroeconomics is about the system that money lives in: who creates it, who sets its price, and why it buys less each year. Budgeting advice will not tell you why your rent outran your raise — that is a macro question, and it is the one almost nobody is taught.
The core mechanism — that loans create deposits and central bank liabilities settle everything — can be understood properly in an afternoon. Getting fluent enough to read a central bank balance sheet or follow a policy decision takes a few weeks of short, regular sessions. OpenMacro is built around five-minute lessons for that reason.
The primary sources are free and excellent but assume prior knowledge: the Bank of England's 2014 bulletin "Money creation in the modern economy", the Federal Reserve's own explainers, and the ECB's policy pages. OpenMacro is a free, open-source, MIT-licensed course built on top of those sources, designed to make them readable — it cites them directly on every glossary entry so you can check the claim yourself.
Read a central bank's balance sheet and say what each line means. Follow a rate decision through to the price of a mortgage. Explain what quantitative easing did and — just as importantly — what it did not do. Recognise when a news story about money is describing a mechanism incorrectly, which is most of the time.
There is a separate guide for parents, guardians and teachers, covering what to introduce at what age and how to explain inflation and bank money to a child.
How to teach kids about money