Fixed Income Securities

I recommend against Mankiw, and to be honest, macroeconomics as a whole. But particularly undergrad macroeconomics. Undergrad macro textbooks are more or less designed to teach you how to work a model, and how to prove theorems about a model. But when all is said and done, macro tends not to go the distance and demonstrate how the model relates to the real world. They also get important details wrong. Most of the west doesn’t work on a fractional reserve system anymore, and the main constraint for money creation is not the reserve ratio. Honestly you’d be better off learning very basic accounting, then learning about bank balance sheets, then learning about basic financial plumbing like the repo market, money market funds, and the fed’s operations. I like Bruce Tuckman’s book ‘fixed income securities’ for the latter. It’s very practical, without any of the theoretical nonsense you sometimes encounter in advanced texts.