A Macroeconomic View of the Current Economy

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A Macroeconomic View of the Current Economy

Executive Summary:
Concerned or confused by the economic environment? Take some lessons from history and concepts from macroeconomics to get a better understanding of how the economy works. A Q&A with HBS professor David A. Moss, author of A Concise Guide to Macroeconomics: What Managers, Executives, and Students Need to Know. Key concepts include:

Macroeconomics involves thinking about the economy as a whole, rather than the actions of individual actors.
The three pillars of macroeconomics: output, money, and expectations.
A good grasp of macroeconomics will help readers make better sense of the business news and trends.
We can use the long history of financial markets and institutions in figuring out how to prevent another financial crisis.

David A. Moss is the John G. McLean Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School.

If they didn't understand it already, executives and corporate managers have learned one huge lesson over the past couple of years: macroeconomics matters.

Interest rates. Exchange rates. Trade deficits. The Gross Domestic Product. Inflation. All of these can affect a company's bottom line by influencing the cost and availability of money, goods, and services. Macroeconomic forces can conspire to make business more difficult, but they can also present opportunities to executives who know how to, for example, read a country's national income accounts and balance of payments.

For explanations on how the economic system works and what history teaches us, business readers might turn to A Concise Guide to Macroeconomics: What Managers, Executives, and Students Need to Know, by Harvard Business School professor David A. Moss, who holds graduate degrees from Yale in economics and history. The book, which grew out of background notes Moss wrote for his MBA students, is a nontechnical, accessible explanation of broad concepts such as "output," "money," and "expectations"—as well as more specific ones ranging from real exchange rates to total factor productivity. Moss also includes numerous tools for interpreting big-picture economic developments.

We asked Moss to talk about the book and some of the events now taking place on the macroeconomic horizon.

Sean Silverthorne: What's the definition of macroeconomics?

David Moss: It involves thinking about the economy as a whole. Micro is about firms and individual actors and how they behave; macro is about aggregate performance of the economy: overall GDP, trade surplus or deficit, inflation.

In principle, we should be able to get rid of the (macro/micro) distinction because all micro behavior—all the firms and individuals—add up to the aggregate economy. But it turns out that we're not there yet. There's still a great deal we don't fully understand. We see patterns at the macro level that are sometimes hard to disaggregate and pinpoint exactly where they came from at the micro level. So as a result, we separate macro and micro. Someday, if we ever figured everything out, these things would come together. That's true in many areas of study.