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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.
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Sal Khan explains banking step by step. He starts with one island, one bank vault and 1,000 gold coins. Then he adds fractional reserve banking, leverage, the central bank and open market operations, and ends with the real balance sheet of the US Federal Reserve. There are 25 videos, each with questions about what it says. In the last videos, Sal argues against parts of the system he has just explained.
No background needed. What the number in your banking app really is, what a bank does with it, what an interest rate is for, and how a decision in Frankfurt reaches your mortgage.
Why people accept paper money that is not backed by gold, what inflation really is, and what goes wrong when a currency fails.
Building a hospital and bombing a city can both make GDP grow. This module shows why. GDP measures what is produced in a year, not what a country owns. It also cannot tell spending that is used up from things that last, or show who pays in the end.
Farming is 2% of the economy, and nobody can eat without it. Computer chips are under 1%, and a shortage stopped car factories. Learn to tell how big a sector is from how much would stop without it. They are two different rankings.
How a payment actually settles, why banks hold reserves, and what really limits lending.
One borrower, eleven maturities, eleven rates. Why price and yield are one number, what an inversion actually says, and how to read the curve as published on 3 September 2026.
Who actually pays for a debt that is never repaid, what debasement has historically been used to fund, and what the same resources build when they go into capital instead.
Money grew 69%, consumer prices 32%, houses 60%. Why holding property through that transfers wealth from whoever held euros, what puts a floor under a price — and why Dublin still fell by half.
The rate most euro area mortgages reset on, and almost nobody can define correctly. What it measures, why it moves before the ECB does, what a reset costs — and five questions that separate knowing from understanding.
IMT, stamp duty, IMI, maintenance and the agency commission, to the euro — and how many years of appreciation it takes to clear them. Then owning against renting, and the same flat bought purely to make money.
IORB, the ON RRP floor, the discount window and the DFR corridor — posted entry by entry.
Offshore dollars, swap lines, resolution and the doom loop — and how to tell one kind of crisis from another.
The real H.4.1, line by line: what the Fed owns, who holds its liabilities, and why reserves are whatever is left over. Figures as reported for 2 September 2026.
The Eurosystem's weekly statement against the Fed's: a fifth of it gold, two reserve accounts instead of one, and a lending framework it no longer needs. Figures as at 28 August 2026.
The sterling trade, priced rather than retold: why the ERM position was unbearable, why shorting a peg costs only carry, what defending one actually spends, and the arithmetic of Black Wednesday.
Which channels of influence between Basel and Frankfurt are real: standards that must pass a legislature, research that sets the terms, statistics nobody else collects — and which are the other way round.
Fourteen countries, two currencies with one name, and a peg fixed at 655.957 since 1999. What the account in Paris was, what changed in 2020, and who bears the cost of a rate that cannot move.
One BIS experiment, read properly. What a wholesale CBDC changes and what it does not, what Mariana actually built, what instant settlement costs in parked liquidity, which control features are new — and who would have to say yes before any of it is money.
Every other module explains a lever. This one is about where to set it: the stance against an unobservable neutral, a rule worth departing from, lags that make today’s inflation unreachable, supply against demand, and why the rate can price credit but never say what it is for.
Crises are where decades of output go. Capital that is not a pot of money, liquidity that kills solvent banks in a day, a stress test that only scores the scenario it was given, and the question of who takes the loss — decided in advance, or at four in the morning.
A published list and a haircut schedule, which together decide which assets are nearly cash — and therefore what every bank wants to hold. The quietest instrument a central bank has, and the one it reaches for when a weekend has to be survived.
The output gap is revised by whole points, the quarter you are deciding on has not been published, your forecast is conditional on an assumption nobody reads, and the variable that matters most cannot be observed. What to do anyway.
What reserves are actually for, what holding them costs every year, why buying foreign currency is a domestic monetary operation, and the swap line network that decides which countries have to insure themselves at all.
Settlement, intraday liquidity and operational risk — the largest thing a central bank operates and the least discussed.
Currency mismatch, capital flow cycles and fiscal dominance — running a central bank without the assumptions the textbooks make.
Consolidated balance sheets, the monetary financing line and central bank losses — the boundary with the finance ministry, technically.
How inflation is measured, which measure to act on, where expectations come from, and what wages and exchange rates really do to prices.
Where 2% came from, what the lower bound does to a framework, make-up strategies, and the anchors that suit other countries.
Conditioning assumptions, models and judgement, fan charts and risk management, and what to do after a very large miss.
The six transmission channels, why the lags are long and variable, why the same decision differs by country, and what to do when transmission breaks.
Non-bank intermediation, margin spirals, central counterparties, and lending to institutions that are not banks.
Why a country that issues its own currency cannot be bankrupted, what the debt costs instead, and why productivity is the only lever that helps twice.
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 — and finally the Fed's own balance sheet, as published this week. 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