Hiroshi Fukumitsu
In Japan many universities have served "securities markets" as one of main subjects in their curriculum. Securities markets has a history. It has its' root in prewar subject "stock exchanges". Prewar subject "stock exchanges" mainly treated the ways of trading.
Aftre th second world war there were a struggle to revised the subject "stock exchanges" as social science. Scientists who want to study it scientificly forcused on themes like the structure of the markets, the relation between macro economy and securites markets, the markets regulation and the historical development of the markets so-on.
On the other hand finance has its root on the quantitative studies to analyze behavior patterns of economic entities in financial markets. Those analytic studies are also common in recent microeconomics. In those studies the problems are treated in a purely statistical way. Sometimes historical backgrounds are disappeared. But I think institutional knowledge about markets is indispensable for those who study finance.
Securities market and finance are complementary to each other.
Scholars of securities markets should study finance and take their results of analytical studies in finance. But they should also develop their own institutional analysis.
Those who adovocate finance say the lecture of "money and banking" is out-of-date. They say the lecture of finance serves indispensable knowledge to understand the market-based financial mechanisim, such as micro-behavior of economic entities in financial markets and market-based financial business. Finance is composed of investments and corporte finance. And investments is split into asset pricing and derivatives. The knowledge of investments is directly related to finance business. It is useful for them who want to get their jobs in that field.
But many universities is still reluctant to close "money and banking". Though it is definitely old fashioned, the subject is still alive and indispensable especially on the monetary policy of central banks and the cash-flow mechanism of macro economy. I recommend my colleagues that they shoud keep "money and banking".
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